Post #11 - October 22, 2012 - Nara, Japan

Today was an awesome day! It started out at the leisurely hour of 8am, when we began packing our bags for our trip to Nara. We had bought some things to eat for breakfast so before we checked out of our hotel we walked down the street to the McDonald's to grab a couple coffees and eat our breakfast. What a great way to start a day! Nothing like taking it easy in the morning. I'm thinking we'll definitely have to do that more often.

Both Patty and I have been pretty exhausted the past couple of days, running from one site to the next, and I think we're coming to realize that more is not better. At least not for us. Not to mention I think we'd both burn out long before our six months is up if we keep up this pace. Today we learned an important lesson: we need to find a pace that will both allow us to see things AND experience them in a meaningful sense. Not to mention the stress of running from one site to the next just to put a check mark in a box isn't our style, nor is it the reason we decided to come on this trip in the first place. From now on we're going to try to find a better balance between seeing as much as possible and not closing ourselves off (due to fatigue, stress, etc.) to new or worthwhile experiences.

Once we were done our breakfast of bananas, oranges, and croissants, we headed back to our hotel to grab our stuff. Here, Patty had the wonderful idea of taking the subway to the train station instead of the bus. Until then, we had only taken buses in Kyoto because we could get a well-priced, daily bus pass. The subway turned out to be similar to those in Tokyo, so we felt right at home. It wasn't until we arrived at the station that the trouble started.

I had looked up how to get to Nara the night before, so we knew we had to take a specific train line, Kintetsu, to get to Nara in the least expensive fashion. So, when we arrived at the station, we began looking around for where to buy tickets. We wandered around a bit until we realized that we couldn't buy the tickets we needed anywhere in sight. So it was time to muddle our way through a conversation with a local. We were informed that we needed to go to the other side of the train station. Long story short, whenever we asked for directions, we immediately saw signs that pointed us in the direction of the Kintetsu line. Except once. We got lost because of a bad sign. But everyone is so helpful here that as long as we could pluck up the courage to ask, people were more than willing to help us out. Even once we had bought our ticket and walked through the gate, we would not have been able to figure out which train to get on, let alone where to transfer, had some very kind worker not gone out of his way to write down on a piece of paper the time, departure platform, name of destination on train #1, and the name of the station where we had to transfer. Wonderful. So, we hopped on the train, transferred where we needed to, a train was waiting for us bound for Nara, and in no time we stepped out onto the streets of Nara.

Getting our bearing and arriving at our hostel took only 20 minutes or so, and we dropped off our backpacks there and set off for somewhere close to eat our packed lunch. There is a huge park on the east side of Nara where many of the major sites are, so that's where we headed. Our Lonely Planet book suggests a route for seeing all the sites in Nara, so we began following that. We got to the first stop, called Isui-en, one of Nara's finest gardens, realized we needed to each pay 500 Yen to get in, turned around and headed for stop two. I think it's a combination of being sick of paying to see everything and being really hungry that caused us to turn around. Like Patty mentioned in her previous post, benches of any sort are a rarity in this country.

We walked for about 5 minutes until we reached a more central part of the park, and emerged directly between two of the recommended sites, Nandai-mon and Todai-ji. I'll get to those in a second. One thing you might not know about Nara is that there are actually tame/docile/overly-friendly deer wandering around all over the park. At first, it was pretty cute that they didn't just run away from us, and that we could even touch them. Here's me having a polite conversation with one of them:

But they're not all fun and games, these deer. If you don't give them what they want, they can be pretty feisty. Here's me losing a game of tug of war with one of them (yes, that is a map...they're apparently not very picky eaters):

While this particularly bossy deer is trying to eat our very useful map, we were of course trying to eat our lunch. So after this deer wouldn't leave us alone, we decided to pack up and run away. Thankfully, she did not follow us. I don't know why she couldn't be more cute, like this one:

Anyway, we ended up running up to the gate of the Todai-ji to this particularly breathtaking view:

This behemoth is the Daibutsu-den Hall, home of Nara's famous Daibutsu (Great Buddha). The Hall itself is the largest wooden building in the world. Impossibly, the present structure, rebuilt in 1709, is only two-thirds the size of the original! Now, you might not be able to tell the scale of this guy from the picture, but let me assure you that this building is a beast. It's one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.

As mentioned earlier, this Hall houses Nara's Great Buddha, another magnificent thing to behold. Unfortunately, I don't think any picture could do the size of this thing justice. The Buddha is one of the largest bronze figures in the world and was originally cast in 746. It currently stands over 16 metres tall and consists of 437 tonnes of bronze and 130 kg of gold!!! Here is the best pic:

We lingered quite a while here. The building and the Buddha are truly stunning. After this, we quickly ran to the main gate of the Todai-ji, called the Nandai-mon, which was also pretty impressive. Then we continued on with the path suggested by our book and took a short jog up a hill, climbed some steps, and got a nice view of Nara from a veranda:

From here we decided to head back to our hostel to freshen up before going for dinner. Luckily, we were not more than 20 minutes away and got back no problem. We were taken for a tour of the house, which is about 100 years old, and represents a typical old-school Japanese home. It is VERY cool. Apparently the previous owner had been a tea master, but I'm not exactly sure what that means. The house is definitely missing some comfy-ness, but it'll more than do for one night.

We decided that our destination for dinner was going to be an Italian restaurant recommended by our book. And what a meal! Patty ordered a pizza that she claimed was one of the best she'd ever had. I agree that it was delicious (we shared of course). And I ordered an interesting rice casserole that was good, but not so good that I wasn't yearning for another pizza instead. We ended up getting dessert, which was really different. It was a combination of vanilla and green tea ice cream, rice balls, crispy flakes, and some other odds and ends. Not sure I'd order it again, but it was enjoyable.

That's about it for today. Tomorrow we are taking the overnight train to Hiroshima so we might have trouble writing a post tomorrow, but we'll try!

Hope you're all well! Good night!