Down in Utah

I made it safely to Salt Lake City, and my holiday here is going well, despite not being able to snowboard. I've successfully resisted picking up a couple of new wives, although I have been tempted. On average, girls are quite attractive in this city, perhaps because of a clandestine eugenics program, the healthy challenges of living in a high altitude desert, or maybe even extraordinary amounts of concentrated prayer. If membership to a certain religion did genuinely deliver physical beauty, would it become the most popular and powerful religion on the planet?

I managed to make it to Temple Square downtown, and took a look at the impressive and very Disneyland-esque Mormon Temple there. I wasn't allowed inside of course, since I'm not a member of the church of LDS, but I did take a tour of the various monuments around the grounds by two charming young LDS missionaries, Sister Thacker and Sister Tanner. They both were very young (around eighteen I think) and were so overwhelmingly nice that I resisted making all the usual cracks about polygamy and alcohol, even when they were deep in their spiel about how cool it would be for me to join their church. Sister Tanner had her patter down pretty well, but Sister Thacker was really nervous, with her hands shaking visibly as she explained for the seventh time how being in the Temple Square gave her a sense of peace.

As for the rest of Utah, it's very flat and has a lot of strip malls. It also has a Best Buy where I bought a new Canon SD600 digicam, but more on that later.