Look, it's Bambi's mom! Wait...

Back again for some bad writing eh?

Prior to our jaunt up Ikoma mountain, we made a brief stop in the main part of Nara. Our Goal? Nara Park and Todaiji Temple.

PIctures, do your stuff!



I live in Osaka, but my work often likes to send me to Nara to teach at the schools there. It's not terribly far, but I'd much rather just stay in the city. Getting home @ 10:30 every night is a biatch. However, the one redeeming quality about the train ride is the view is pretty incredible. The train reaches this one area before Ikoma where you can see pretty far off into the distance. Osaka is actually pretty ugly by day, but looks passable by night. Kinda like how most people look better in dim lighting. hehe! Regardless, it's nice to see both the night and day. This pic you see above was taken from the train. What still amazes me about Japan is the sheer amount of concrete everywhere. Man, I miss trees and grass. :(



Here's a pretty important 5 storey pagoda. It's name is...uh...5 storey pagoda thing. Yeah! That's it! You calling me a liar? Here's the thing, most of the signage is in Japanese. There's barely any English even for the tourists. I think they only make signs and such for the A-list historical sites. Maybe this pagoda is like the Greg Kinnear of historical sites?



On our way to Todaiji Temple, we passed by the (in)famous Nara Park. The "feature" of this park that distinguishes it from the other run-of-the-mill parks is that this one has deer. Yup, deer. You can buy a stack of "deer cookies" from the various vendors and feed the deer that are walking around. In case you cared, the cookies are of the same texture as waffle cones. The deer are all incredibly docile and let you approach them to feed them. The only thing is, if you try to pet them, they back off. Bastards.



Here's our friend Anh Tran (it rhymes!) feeding some deer. More like teasing the poor thing. I think at one point she actually had a piece of the cookie in the deer's mouth and she still managed to yank it out. Yeah, it's kinda cruel, but you gotta admit it's kinda funny.


Another item on my list of odd fascinations is Koi, the wonderful, giant and ugly as hell goldfish/carp things that the Japanese like to put in their water. It has always been near impossible for me to take decent pictures of, but they had a really shallow pond area swarming with these bad boys. Man, they're ugly. The ridiculous thing is that an individual fish can cost THOUSANDS of dollars. They probably don't even taste that good.



This is the main front gate of Todaiji Temple. The main grounds are actually a continuation of Nara Park, so yeah, there were deer everywhere. How sweet would it be to just laze around all day and have people feed you? A highlight of the day was the vendor selling soft serve green tea ice cream. That stuff is delicious. I actually had the vanilla green tea swirl which was heaven in a cone. :)





This hulking monstrosity is the temple guardian on the left side of the entrance. I left those ladies in the picture to give you folks at home some scale of how big it really is. There was one on the right side, but this one looked way cooler.



After much walking we finally arrived at the main temple building. Unfortuneately, they require payment of the monetary variety in order to go look around. 5 bucks? Get outta here! This pic was taken through the fence. I'm such a rebel.


Look! It's Val!

Well, that's all for now. Thanks for reading that ridiculously long post. I think we're supposed to go to some kind of traditional tea ceremony soon so more pics to come I'm sure. Also, word on the street is cherry blossoms soon. Get ready for pink! Later skater!