Temple Square and MORE DANCING! :)

For our last day together, we took Ale and Tati to Temple Square. It's amazing that you can go up there and just ask for a tour in any language and they can make it available! We were able to get a Spanish tour guide to show us around and our girls really enjoyed it. Here we are in the tabernacle.

I've never actually taken the tour of Temple Square so this was a great opportunity for our family to listen to the missionaries tell us about the history. We had one missionary speaking English and one speaking Spanish. While we were in the tabernacle a woman did the sound test. The one where she rips a piece of paper from the front of the room, and drops a pin . . . it's absolutely AMAZING! With the way the building is constructed, you can hear those tiny sounds across the entire tabernacle without the use of a microphone! I also thought it was interesting, they told us that back in the day this tabernacle could seat 10,000 people and now it seats about 3,000. It's because the people were so much smaller back then. Here are our girls with the Spanish speaking missionary from Mexico.

This is the missionary who spoke to us. She was from India and spoke English. It's pretty amazing and fun to meet people up there who are from all over the world.

We finally got to see the new model of the temple! It's so cool! I've been wanting to see this ever since I heard about it . . . in the visitor's center is a model cut-out of the Salt Lake City temple. We all enjoyed looking at it for quite awhile. It was fascinating to see the rooms in miniature and be able to show the kids where we have been inside the temple and what the different rooms are for.

This is the side view.

Here are the kids enjoying the view of the temple from the South Visitor's Center. Athena decided she wants to get married in this temple because Jeremy and I were married here, and so were both of her grandparents. Quite a legacy!

Here are Ale and Tati finishing up their tour and filling out some information for the tour guide.

My kids by the Christus.

Here we all are under his care. :)

Temple Square turned out to be a really good experience. We ended up spending a lot of time there and had to hurry home. In fact, for dinner we stopped at a gas station and I made sandwiches in the car while everyone ran inside for a little after-dinner treat. Then we drove home . . . stopped at Ross for a little more shopping . . . then back to the dance festival!

It was nice to calm down for the evening once we dropped off Ale and Tati. We enjoyed our last night at the festival. We walked by to see this lovely scene - all of the dancers from Paraguay, dressed up so beautifully, eating popsicles. :)

This is before the performance. We had to interrupt the popsicle-fest for this lovely shot.

Tati and Ale. Aren't they beautiful? I really like these costumes of theirs.

This is part of the pre-show.

This group is from Nepal. They are all pretty young, but they spoke perfect English. Hm, who would've expected?

During the performance from Nepal, they did this dance in honor of the Yeti. They had someone dressed in this ragged white costume. In the middle of the dance it jumped off the stage and came down into the crowd. Alexandra was on my lap in a flash! She took my arms and wrapped them around her so tight and wouldn't let me loosen my grip. She HATES people in costume. It really freaked her out. Luckily it went to the other side of the audience and not where we were sitting. We were in the front row! I don't think she would have recovered if it had turned left instead of right.

Ahhhh, our dancers from Paraguay. :) Fun to watch!

Here is Spain again. I have to include this picture because it has the tall guy in the middle who all the girls were just IN LOVE with - including Samantha. She was absolutely taken by him!

This group is from Mongolia. They were more entertaining than I would have thought, especially the men's dances! They were very athletic, jumping all over the stage.

After the performance, a lot of the dancers and host families stayed around at the park. The Czech group played music with their instruments and a lot of us danced. Athena was just itching to get in on the fun and dance with one of the guys from Spain. I finally asked one of them to dance with her. You can see by her face that she pretty much thought it was the greatest thing EVER!

Here is Ale dancing with our friend, Austin. Samantha is behind them, watching.

Near the end of the night we happened to walk by the guy Samantha had been admiring throughout the entire festival. I hurried and stopped him to ask for a picture. As you can see, she also thought this was the greatest thing EVER!!!

And this is the close to that very fun, and very busy day. We got home late with everyone asleep in the car.