Nara

Ahem.

I realize that in composing my last post, I may have imbibed more than is seemly for a gentleman in social circumstances. This--ah--incident shall not repeat itself. Hopefully.

For our second day (Thursday) in Kyoto we split up. Nate and Shan decided to take it easy in the city, and Dane and I would go to Nara, one of the former capitals of Japan and a city famous for its shrines. After one of our trademark train dashes, we managed arrived in Nara just before noon.

The first thing I noticed was how many gaijin there were. Every few hundred meters there was a foreigner, and the locals took advantage of them. Every 500 meters there was a billboard map pointing the way to the next shrine, and on every block at least three overpriced restaurants were doing business. My hopes of finding a decent meal for cheap fell sharply.

Still, Nara is a nice enough city. The streets are clean, there are tiny loudspeakers that play soothing music (which freaked me out) and there are tame deer. Small, delicate, friendly deer. They let you pet them, and you can buy biscuit to feed them (we didn't). According to legend, a god rode into the spot that became Nara on a white deer, so the deer are sacred animals.

Dane and I walked maybe 10 kilometers that day, and saw most of the sights. The pagoda and temples were beautiful, but I didn't see anything that impressed me the way Kyoto had. The most noticeable feature of Nara for me was the lanterns. Everywhere, these stone lanterns. One of the guide plaques said there were 3,000 of the damn things. I'm curious who paid for it all.

Eventually we got hungry and tired and found lunch in a convenience store before returning to Kyoto, where we met up with Shan and Nate to go back to Utsunomiya. Shan will continue the story there.

Peace,
ian