What We've Been Up To... It's Been a Year!!!

So it's been a year since Kim and I met (and some change). But, we spent the day together in Salt Lake celebrating. And yes, we did it on the day that we met. And yes, Jon remembered the day. We started out going to the This Is the Place park. We had been wanting to go for a while (since at least April) but every time we tried, something happened where we couldn't get in (this also happens whenever we go up to SL to see the Joseph Smith movie and whenever we try to hike the Y...) This time we made it happen. It was a cool little town made of restored homes that they had brought up from the valley. It's on Brigham Young's old farm house, which turns out, he never lived at but had workers there that he employed. But the town had a bank, a school, ZCMI - the world's first department store! - a carpenter's shop, a tin shop, a Native American "village" and tons more. I love history (esp. LDS history) so it was cool to see all the stuff the way that Utah settlers would have had it.

We spent some time in the school where they taught kids the old school way: girls on one side, boys on the other. We also found out that before the state was founded, they were trying to start a new alphabet and way of spelling. Pretty funky... they had the alphabet up on the wall and we tried to spell our names. I did just as horrible with that alphabet as I do in English or Spanish. We also checked out the carpentry shop where they were hand making some bowels and serving dishes, and they had some pretty sweet coffins outside, too!

It's too small!

After the park, we went to the aquarium in Sandy. I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical about it. We had driven by it earlier and it seemed REALLY small. It looked like a remodeled super market or something. We got there and I was blown away with everything that they had. We spent an hour there and probably could have spent more time if we actually stopped to read a lot of the signs that they had posted. It's no Monterrey Bay Aquarium, but it had lots to do!

Kim Scared of Sharks!

They had a Utah exhibit that we sped through pretty fast. We weren't too interested in bull frogs and carp from Utah lake or bluegills. They had an ocean exhibit with sharks, seahorses, tropical fish, jelly fish almost everything. They even had a place that we could pet the sting rays! They had a huge tank that had a couple of sharks in it along with a Morey eel. The sharks kept swimming in circles so we got some pretty good shots.

They also had a South American exhibit. They had penguins, anacondas, spiders, perahnna and tons more. The anaconda that they had was over 10 feet long and still growing. The penguins were cool to see for me because every time that I tell people I lived in Argentina for two years, they ask if I saw any penguins. Even though I didn't see any there, I've seen ones that came from Argentina. Close second, right?