Utah: the State of the Softest Snow
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Park City has been known as the city for skiing, and it should not be surprising if I tell you that it once held the winter Olympics. Despite all the winter-related facts, I went there in the summer of my sophomore year, yet it did not lose any of its charms.
To be honest with you guys, I was there for a nerdy reason: mathematics summer school. The school was held by the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS). The topic was about low dimensional topology and gauge theory. However, during the three weeks of my summer school, I got chances to explore the town with my friends, so let me share some of my favorite spots with you guys!
Forth of July at Park city: My roommates and I decided to avoid the crowd by hiking at the Armstrong trail. We didn’t reach the top because we wanted to have lunch, but the view from halfway to the top was pretty cool. You can see half of the city and hear the celebrating noises from afar. After that, we went to Harvest, one of the best brunch places! I ordered that yummy-looking salmon toast. On the way back to our hotel, Shadow Ridge, we got a chance to see the parade, and that nicely finish up our day.
Sunday Silly Park Market
Sunday Silly Park market has been advertised a lot since I stepped on Park City. I really enjoyed seeing a lot of crafts, food, people, and music bands. This picture was taken from the sky bridge, where we are able to see the whole historic town.
Salt Lake City
It is the capital city of Utah and has been known as the city of mormons. Win, Isabel, Jose, and I decided to spend a day here. I called an uber and stopped at the temple square, our first destination. It was gorgeous, but none of us were religious enough to understand what was going on. After wandering around, we stopped at the rolled ice cream place called Doki Doki. The ice cream was so thick, and we really enjoyed the atmosphere of that place. Then, we went to see the Obon festival, which is our main purpose. Unfortunately, it was not as big as we thought, yet the Taiko, a Japanese traditional drum performance, was very impressive!
Later that week, Win and I also went to Salt Lake City again to see some places we had missed on the other day, which includes the capitol of Utah and the public library. Their structures are so aesthetically pleasing. One thing I want to mention is that we literally observed mountains everywhere!
Silver Lake - Ontario trail
Never a week without hiking in Park City. This time Win and I decided to go to a more difficult trail called Silver Lake- Ontario trial. The trail took us like 2 hrs to climb up, but you may use much less than this because we stopped multiple times to take pictures! Honestly, the Silver Lake trail was much prettier than the other one, so I want to recommend you take the round trip at the same Silver Lake trail without going to the Ontario one.
What more could I ask for?
A date! Okay, it was wild, but since the timing was synced, I got to see one of my favorite humans whose name is so similar to mine. Poy came to visit me two days before the camp was done. He drove me to the Great Salt Lake, which is full of fruit flies, but nothing could really ruin that amazing scenery!
Later in the evening, we went to a Tapas place called Eva. Indeed, the food was great, and the atmosphere was decent, but the service did not meet our standards. Anyway, it didn’t matter since I had the best date(?) in the restaurant that night.
Good morning! You may wonder where to have breakfast if not in the hotel. Here I want to recommend another tasteful brunch place in Park City. 5seeds killed it! I ordered that hot cake and a set of eggs and sausages, and just looking at them made my mouth water! Then, we went hiking! Yes, again! This time we went to the Donut Falls trail. The trail was straightforward if we do not get lost, and, on the way to the falls, it was full of gorgeous views that we had to stop to take pictures. ( P.S. All of these couldn’t have happened without you, Thank you:)
Some more people I want to say “Thank you” to
Even though it seems I spent time traveling a lot during the summer school, what I really did is studying, solving math problems, and making connections with people from several schools and universities. The program was incredible, and I would like to thank all the organizers who made this happen! The last picture was taken on Win’s birthday. He seemed to enjoy our homemade ice cream cake, didn’t he? Happy Birthday, Win!!
Before this trip, I had never been to Texas or New Mexico. Initially, our plan was to visit only Big Bend National Park in southern Texas, near the border with Mexico. However, we stumbled upon a blog where the author mentioned that there are several other national parks not far from Big Bend. In fact, the area is home to four remarkable parks– Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, and White Sands. Despite their proximity, these parks are incredibly distinct from one another. We thoroughly enjoyed exploring the unique natural beauty each had to offer.
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.