So here's the sitch: I am indeed home, but as you can clearly see, I am very behind in my blogging. It would be very weird to just stop with Kyoto since the trip went on for another three weeks, plus I have so many other things to talk about. So I plan on continuing the blog. Hear that? I'M STILL GOING TO KEEP WRITING, and in fact, the updates probably will be more frequent then they have been lately since I am just on summer vacation. So Please Please Please keep on checking for updates, peeps, cause I've got tons more things to say and pictures to post!
That week after Kyoto went rather uneventfully, other than Haru-chan spending a few days since it was his summer vacation and his family was busy. That Friday though (after going to see The Dark Knight Rises in theaters ^_^), our friend Alisa spent the night at our place again in order for us to head out to Nara the next day. Many of my friends had already been there, and since I had learned about Nara in my Japanese class back at MSU, I'd really wanted to go. Nara has a lot of famous tourist attractions, the most famous being the Daibutsu, which is the largest Buddha statue in the world. It's also famous for its deer who would probably eat the clothes off your body if you didn't pay attention to them. Around 10 on Saturday morning we headed off to the station to go to Kyoto, since there was no direct train to Nara.
Some how, Alex and I still had tickets to go one way to Kyoto from our trip the weekend before. We were excited about that, since that meant we would only have to pay for the trip on the way back. At the Kyoto station, we simply transferred trains to one that ended at Nara. It was pretty simple really, and it only took us about the same amount of time it would have taken us to get to Osaka.
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| Riding the train |
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| The view from the train |
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| Nara Station |
The downtown of the city was pretty large and busy, but despite the large buildings, the place still seemed big and open. The sky was also perfectly blue and it was ridiculously hot. We went next door to a tourist info center where we asked how to get to the Daibutsu, since that was what we wanted to see the most and we probably wouldn't have time for the other tourist destinations. We ended up taking a bus that dropped people off at said touristy places, and we ended up at the park containing the Todaiji (東大寺), meaning the Eastern Great Temple, which houses the Daibutsu (大仏), the Great Buddha. The temple is very old, it dates back to the 8th century, and I believe it is all the original buildings.As soon as we got in the neighborhood of the temple, we started to see the deer everywhere. We bought some senbei crackers, and as soon as they were opened, we were surrounded by deer, snapping at us for the crackers (and even eating the wrappers), pulling on our clothes, and one even bit my butt even though I hadn't even taken out at any crackers!
We continued down that path, feeding the few deer that were willing to venture out of the shade of the trees and into the sun. We saw so many tourists! I thought there had been a lot of foreigners in Kyoto, but MAN! I swear, the majority of the people there were foreign- lots of Koreans, Australians, Brits, Germans, Italians, Americans, Indians, Canadians, Chinese! We reached the temple and had to pay to get inside, where we could see the Great Buddha hall. We lit incense, took pictures, found out our fortunes (I have "half luck"), took more pictures, and then head back to the bus since we didn't really have time to go anywhere else.
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| The main gate of the Todaiji |
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| People, deer, and scary statues |
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| Todaiji |
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| The Great Buddha Hall |
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| Lighting Incense |
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| The Daibutsu- it's a lot bigger than it looks |
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| My half luck fortune |
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| Deer like the shade |
We took a bus back to what we thought was our station, but it was actually the local train station, not at all connected to the JR Station we needed to be at. Instead we had to walk 15 minutes to find the JR station, which meant we missed our train and had to wait for the next one.
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| Lost >_< |
The way the tickets work when you buy tickets in advance from the machines in town, is that it gives you a set of tickets, like Hikone to blah blah town, blah blah town to Kyoto, Kyoto to Osaka, etc, and you usually just show the tickets at the booth to show you bought them all, and they let you through. So when we'd arrived in Nara, the lady at the booth forgot to take our tickets from us and just handed them back to us, so Alex and I didn't even need to buy tickets back from Kyoto! So even though we didn't pay for that money, we basically spent that much trying to keep hydrated that day T_T.
We got back close to 6, and Alisa headed back to her homestay, but Alex and I called our friend Jeff, the other guy staying in Nagahama. If you read about when I arrived in Hikone, you would have heard how my first day there, Alex, Jeff, and I met this old man who spoke to us for like 20 minutes completely in Kansai dialect and then told us we should come to his festival that he didn't know when would happen. So that guy apparently came to our school the day before and went to the office and asked for the red haired kid who break dances. Seeing as Jeff is the only one who fits that description, the office got Jeff and the old man told Jeff to bring Alex and me and go to this festival in Hikone that weekend and find him. Jeff met up with us, and with a business card, we tried to find the old man's work place. Well, he worked at the welcome center, but by the time we found it, it was closed. It's IMPOSSIBLE to navigate streets in Japan. Only the main intersections will have street signs on them. Any other streets they will usually just have a tiny little plaque, hardly bigger than a business card that has the name of the street written on it in small letters. It is beyond frustrating and very easy to get confused- even Okaasan often makes wrong turns or gets confused when driving.
We then went to the festival, and with the knowledge that the old man was supposed to be running one of the booths, we set out to look for him. Even with our mission in mind, we still took time to enjoy the festival. We wrote paper wishes to tie to the tanabata trees, we bought shaved ice, Japanese food, took pictures, walked along the booths. So even though we never found our friend the old guy, we did have fun at the festival for an hour and a half. I even found a friend of mine and we walked back with her to the station.
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| Jeff and some samurai |
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| So many girls in Yukata! |
So that was a very fun and interesting weekend. :) The next day I basically just relaxed all day XD
Mary
Location: The couch at home, but a different couch than I was on when I wrote that first entry and I said I was on the couch
Mood: Jet laggy
Japanese for the day: それはいいですか？sore wa ii desu ka? - Is that okay?
Very nice. Lots of festive colors. I had seen the pictures of the deer on facebook but did not know where they came from.
ReplyDeleteSo. Many. Deersies. But the temple looked beautiful and the festival looked fun! We're you actually allowed to pet the deer? It looks like you had tons o' fun! :)
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