Leaving Texas- Week in Salt Lake City, AKA Vegan Food Extravaganza!

After 4 days, we hit Salt Lake City, where my wonderful cousin lives. What you need to know is that SLC is divided in half- friendly, clean cut Mormons, and friendly, tattooed, pierced liberal punk-y type people who are pretty much for whatever the Mormons are against, and vice versa. My cousin is not a Mormon, to answer the obvious question. Despite such a radical disparity in the population, the city is awesome, and both groups seem to get along well with one another. Thanks to the latter group, there are TONS of AWESOME vegan places to eat- totally vegan restaurants, omnivore restaurants have lots of vegan/veggie options, it's like a dream.

We spent quite a bit of time at Liberty Park- it's huge and well kept, and the perfect place to study outside.

Because, remember, it wasn't all fun and games- I was researching and writing source summaries for my thesis this whole time, while looking for jobs on top of it.

And I had THIS GUY distracting me all the time

We'd go hiking around places like this, and I would think to myself that Texas REALLY needs to step up its natural beauty game. For reals.

Here's the iconic temple of SLC...

BUT!

There's also this temple- a huge Krishna temple an hour outside of the city, in Provo to be exact, where BYU- the Mormon university- is.

And THIS temple, the Buddhist association

And lastly, THIS temple- they are apparently a sex cult and mummify cats. Yeah.

But back to the iconic temple- there is a little pedestal across the park from the huge temple, where you can stand and take pictures in front of it. This is popular for married people and families, because of the Mormon doctrine of eternal families. Bobby and I just thought it'd be cute to take the stereotypical Mormon picture, and we had the camera all set up on the ground, and then this nice lady came over to take our picture, probably thinking we were a young Mormon couple-Bobby was recently randomly clean shaven, he had run the SLC marathon and was wearing the hoodie, and I had a silver band I happened to be wearing on my left hand. At any rate, we weren't trying to mock it, and we didn't want to turn down the offer, so here's the result-

Lots of sleeping in and getting over the cold I caught on the way up, reading and note taking, hiking and eating vegan food, catching up with my fantastic cousin Jen and finally getting to spend time with her boyfriend and see the tattoo parlor where she works- that pretty much sums up SLC.