Alaska Cruise - Day 9 - Saturday May 30

This morning we took a cab out to the Anchorage Temple. Interesting cab ride, because when we told the cab driver where we were going, he stated asking questions. He said he was Catholic and wanted to know what the difference the Catholics and the Mormons was. I told him that one difference was that the Catholics believed that their authority come directly from the Apostle Peter and we believe that there was an apostasy and that the restoration of the authority and the church took place in 1830 with Joseph Smith. He then went on a long discussion of why people change the name of God. The said some people call him Allah, others Buddha and others call him by different names. The fact that others changed God’s name upset him. We talked about that for a while and then he talked about the bible and I told him about the Book of Mormon and Christ appearing to the American people. This was interesting to him. When I told him that we have modern prophets today just like Moses, he had a hard time with that for a while then it made sense to him. So I did my missionary work for the day. A fellow at the temple gave us a ride back to our hotel.

We then went to the local farmer’s market and walked around for a while and had lunch. I ate a reindeer burger. The guy cooking them said reindeer burgers have a little beef in it so that it adds some fat. The reindeer meet is very low in fat and so needs to have the beef added so it has some fat to cook it. After the farmer’s market we walked down to the Anchorage Museum, where we picked up some tickets for a show tonight at 7pm.

We went back to the Anchorage Museum and went through the gold show. It was a traveling display about all things gold. They had some interesting information on gold mining. they said that gold is found on every continent and most countries. They also told us the all the gold that has been mined all over the world to date would only fill about 60 flat bed trucks or would be a 20 foot cube. Gold is getting harder to find and more expensive to extract from the earth. They had displays about gold from all periods of time throughout our earth's history. They had a lot of different displays that showed gold from each of the periods, including today. One of the displays was of Susan Sarandon’s Oscar, and someone's Emmy, and even a Golden Globe award. They had a place where kids could make their own crowns with some gold seals and other "jewels" that they could glue to their crown. We took enough materials for each of the kids to make a crown. We were not allowed to take pictures in the museum, so there is nothing to show.

After the gold exhibit, we went through the rest of the museum. We saw paintings from various history periods of Alaska. The museum just finished adding on a new wing. The new wing had the section for a traveling exhibit (that had the gold exhibit). There were a couple of other sections that were not finished and would be open next year. Today was the only day that the museum was free to the public, due to the open house of the new wing. So we were blessed to come at this time. I told them that it must be a celebration of my birthday.

Outside the museum there were different things going on all day. When we were there, these people were doing native Alaskan dances. It was fun and interesting to watch.