Day 6
Day 6 was spent exploring the ancient grounds of Nara. Nara is located in the Kansai prefecture, south of Kyoto, and is home to the “Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara”, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nara is also home to many deer, which we had seen many YouTube videos of, and were excited to meet face-to-face.
We started off the day with a lovely Japanese-style breakfast from our hotel, packed up in beautiful picnic baskets, in a park on the side of a mountain. There were things of all different shapes, textures and flavors; we all agreed that the salmon was our favorite.
Right beside our hotel, a shop started to open as we were finishing breakfast, and they were selling packages of deer cookies for 150 yen. The deer could tell something was going on, you could see them crowding around the area and a woman chasing them away occasionally with a broom. We decided we would get some cookies to feed some of the wild deer. Anna was our first test subject.
Impressively, Anna lasted a minute and a half with her deer cookies, despite one of the deer finding a weak spot on her lower flank and relentlessly biting it. The deer were mostly well-behaved except for this one “evil deer”, as she put it. We took turns feeding deer throughout the day, seeing how long we could make our deer cookies last. I panicked and lasted about 20 seconds; I was constantly backtracking and tossing cookies on the ground to try and get some separation between the deer and I, but one deer would vacuum up anything on the ground while the other ones kept a close proximity to me. Luckily I avoided getting bitten or headbutted.
We walked through the Kasugayama Primeval Forest and came across the Kasuga shrine. The shrine was an important shrine during the Heian period, which ran from 794 to 1185. One thing about a lot of the shrines in Japan, is that if we didn’t have portable WiFi with us, it would’ve been very difficult to learn anything about them. Kasuga shrine included, not a lot of the shrines had a ton of history or information about them on hand. Occasionally we would come across a place that offered an English brochure or had a few English signs, but information was limited. Thank goodness for the Pocket WiFi!
We then made our way to Todai-ji, one of the most important Buddhist temples in Japan. It is home to the largest bronze Buddha statue in the world. Photos do it no justice, but the Buddha is an astounding 50 feet tall. The statues shoulders are almost 100 feet across, and there are 960 curls atop its head. Recently, x-rays revealed a human tooth, pearls, mirrors, swords and jewels inside the knee of the Buddha, which are believed to have belonged to Emperor Shomu. The Great Buddha statue was built in 752, but it’s head fell off in 855, so the head is newer than the rest of the Buddha.
After our rainy, cold walk around the forest, we got a taxi to the train station to make our way to our final destination, Tokyo. Tokyo was like stepping into another world, which I’ll get into more in the next post. We were exhausted, so we found our hotel, the New Otani, which was outrageously nice, and walked by hundreds of full-to-the-brim restaurants to a nice little Korean restaurant in Akasaka. Before turning in for the night, we enjoyed a bottle of red overlooking the beautiful 400-year old gardens of our hotel.
We started off the day with a lovely Japanese-style breakfast from our hotel, packed up in beautiful picnic baskets, in a park on the side of a mountain. There were things of all different shapes, textures and flavors; we all agreed that the salmon was our favorite.
Right beside our hotel, a shop started to open as we were finishing breakfast, and they were selling packages of deer cookies for 150 yen. The deer could tell something was going on, you could see them crowding around the area and a woman chasing them away occasionally with a broom. We decided we would get some cookies to feed some of the wild deer. Anna was our first test subject.
Impressively, Anna lasted a minute and a half with her deer cookies, despite one of the deer finding a weak spot on her lower flank and relentlessly biting it. The deer were mostly well-behaved except for this one “evil deer”, as she put it. We took turns feeding deer throughout the day, seeing how long we could make our deer cookies last. I panicked and lasted about 20 seconds; I was constantly backtracking and tossing cookies on the ground to try and get some separation between the deer and I, but one deer would vacuum up anything on the ground while the other ones kept a close proximity to me. Luckily I avoided getting bitten or headbutted.
We walked through the Kasugayama Primeval Forest and came across the Kasuga shrine. The shrine was an important shrine during the Heian period, which ran from 794 to 1185. One thing about a lot of the shrines in Japan, is that if we didn’t have portable WiFi with us, it would’ve been very difficult to learn anything about them. Kasuga shrine included, not a lot of the shrines had a ton of history or information about them on hand. Occasionally we would come across a place that offered an English brochure or had a few English signs, but information was limited. Thank goodness for the Pocket WiFi!
We then made our way to Todai-ji, one of the most important Buddhist temples in Japan. It is home to the largest bronze Buddha statue in the world. Photos do it no justice, but the Buddha is an astounding 50 feet tall. The statues shoulders are almost 100 feet across, and there are 960 curls atop its head. Recently, x-rays revealed a human tooth, pearls, mirrors, swords and jewels inside the knee of the Buddha, which are believed to have belonged to Emperor Shomu. The Great Buddha statue was built in 752, but it’s head fell off in 855, so the head is newer than the rest of the Buddha.
After our rainy, cold walk around the forest, we got a taxi to the train station to make our way to our final destination, Tokyo. Tokyo was like stepping into another world, which I’ll get into more in the next post. We were exhausted, so we found our hotel, the New Otani, which was outrageously nice, and walked by hundreds of full-to-the-brim restaurants to a nice little Korean restaurant in Akasaka. Before turning in for the night, we enjoyed a bottle of red overlooking the beautiful 400-year old gardens of our hotel.