This is day three of my trip to Japan, if you haven’t already, I urge you to read Day One or Two first.
Nicole and I woke up early today and grabbed some snacks in our room before taking the train into Nara. The ride was on an express train and only about 40 minutes. We arrived in Nara a little before noon and enjoyed a delicious breakfast at the train station. I had a curry croissant and Nicole had a giant bun filled with cheese and potatoes. Say what you will about Japan, but their food, all of it, is delicious. I didn’t have a bad dish the whole time we were there.
Nara Park
From the train station we took a bus about 5 minutes up the road to Nara Park. The nice part about visiting Nara, is that it is very easy to see the highlights in a short amount of time. For a tourist with only a day to spend in Nara, Nara Park is a nice way to see the best of the city’s history. The park is home to almost all of Nara’s most famous temples and shrines such as Tōdai-ji, Kōfuku-ji and Kasuga Shrine as well as its famous deer.
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Deer in Nara
I’ll start with the deer. They’re everywhere. Legend has it that a god arrived in Nara on a deer and the deer have been considered sacred ever since. Consequently they’re allowed to wander the city doing deer things and whatever else they want, like waiting for buses at bus stops. As far as I know deer are not allowed on the bus so I’m not sure why they were waiting there.
There are many vendors in Nara Park selling deer biscuits for a few dollars so tourists can feed the deer. The deer go nuts over them. They’re like crack to the deer. If you buy a pack of the biscuits the deer will swarm around you like fire ants. Nicole was pretty popular with the deer after she bought a pack. The deer were really friendly to me the entire day because my pants were deer biscuit colored. I didn’t even need to buy deer biscuits. I felt like Justin Bieber at the Teen Choice Awards.
Kōfuku-ji and Tōdai-ji
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After Nicole and I had our fill of deer companionship, Nicole and I visited Kōfuku-ji temple and the 5 story pagoda beside it. Many of the temples and buildings we saw date back hundreds if not a thousand years. The ones we observed were rarely the original as many of the building destroyed by warring armies and rebuilt several times in their long history. Nevertheless the buildings and their architecture were very impressive to behold.
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Later in the afternoon, we walked over to the Tōdai-ji temple. Up until this point in my adventures through Asia, I was impressed with the architecture for its detail but this was the first ancient building in Korea which impressed me with its size. The entire building and the gate that led to it were massive. I had to get photos of Nicole in front of it to convey the sheer scale of these epic buildings. If they were built today they would be impressive. The fact that they were built 1300 years ago makes their construction that much more impressive. Inside the Kōfuku-ji sits a giant buddha, 50 feet tall and weighing 500 tons. Its one of the largest Buddha’s on Earth. The temple itself, built to house the Buddha, is the largest wooden structure in the world, built entirely of wood without a single nail in the whole structure.
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Back to Osaka
After the Tōdai-ji Nicole and I headed back into Osaka to try some Okonomiyaki. Its amazing. I highly recommend it to anyone visiting Japan. It’s basically a pancake stuffed with some manner of seafood, meat, and/or noodles. You heat it up on the table right in front of you on a medium size stove then cut off pieces for each person to eat. Nicole and I got two, shrimp and squid, and ate them as quickly as two people can eat anything directly off a stove, which meant we ate them at a moderate pace.
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After dinner we returned to our AirBnB and planned for our next day in beautiful Kyoto, home to scenic temples and castles.
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