Weekend in Nara

 On my third weekend in Japan (13 14 August)  Nick and I went to Nara. At this point I still imagined I would have the energy to work all week and then travel somewhere awesome each weekend, plus there was a light festival on. Nara Park, the huge park that takes up the centre of the city, and where all of the historically and culturally significant stuff is, was lit up by 20,000 candles. I thought that it looked incredibly beautiful, but Nick was less than impressed. Probably because he was suffering from a mild case of heat stroke. Nara was really really hot.

Nara is famous for the tame/wild deer that live in Nara park. If you feed them these wafer things they'll pass on a message to the gods or something. The cartoon mascot for Nara (of course there's a cartoon mascot for Nara!) is a Buddha with deer horns.

 

Super weird! Anyways so these deer are everywhere, and for some reasons parents of small children find it hilarious to put packs of wafers in their kids hands and then watch the screaming brats get mobbed by twenty deer. I found it pretty hilarious too. I asked a teacher about it at school (she had also just been to Nara with her young son) and she said it was character building. No comment.

I can't remember the name of this garden, but it was really neat. You had to pay to get into this one but the garden next door was free if you were foreign. I liked the one next door a lot, mainly because it was a little bit more run down, and therefore more like what I thought a garden should look like. It also had a beautiful moss garden, and a little pond that promised views of lively tadpoles. The garden in this picture was worth the entrance fee mainly because for the first time I felt the 'whoa you are in Japan right now' slap in the face.

The first of these two pictures was one of the guardians at the gate leading up to the massive temple where big Buddha lives. On the right is big Buddha himself. His left pal (his left, not your left) is big enough for five monks to stand on while they clean him. He was cleaned to week before we got there so he looked nice and fresh for our visit (he only gets cleaned once a year). I tried to put a picture of the temple he lives in up here but for some reason it isn't oriented the right way and I don't want you to crick your necks looking at it so I left it off. It's apparently the largest wooden structure in the world, but I've heard that about another building so I am skeptical. Hang on I'll pinch a pic from the internets.

 

That's a better picture than the one I took with my iphone anyway. The name of the temple is Todai-ji and the statue of Buddha is called Daibutsu and it is almost 15m tall. Thanks to my visit to Nakayama temple with Kocho two weekends previous I knew exactly what to do, and this time I bought candles for all my friends and my family, and said a little prayer for everyone, so lucky you guys! It was really crowded because we were there at the start of Obon, the festival to honour the dead.

This a picture of the five stories pagoda of Kofukuji temple. The Goju-no-to (Five Storied Pagoda) was built in 725 by the Empress Komyoh, and the current structure was restored in 1426. It is one of the symbols of Nara and is the second highest pagoda in Japan with a height of 50.1 meters. I copy pasted those last two sentences from somewhere else. It was the first of the ancient buildings in Nara that we saw, we were super impressed.

Nick and me lit by some of the 20,000 candles in the park.

While we were in Nara we took a side trip to Iga Ueno, where Ninjas come from. This picture was taken from the top floor of Iga Ueno castle. Cool roof hey? Iga Ueno was a bit of a tourist trap. The ninja museum was super hokey, the live ninja demonstration was super duper hokey, and the other attraction in the town, the museum dedicated to the famous Haiku poet Basho, was completely incomprehensible (don't know why we didn't see that coming...). We had a good laugh though, and got to take a long train ride through the backwaters of Nara and Mie prefectures to get there. Also good for a laugh. We also checked out a school for the children of local Samurai, which was probably the highlight of the side trip. It was nice to sit in the massive tatami mat lecture room and look out on to the ornamental gardens.

Also in Nara we found an amazing 'vegetarian' restaurant (that served fish) where we made up for the lack of veggies in our diet, this rad wool and fabric shop that hand spun all of the cotton they sold (we bought two cotton blankets which we found out last weekend cure hangovers! And we're not even in the land of magical realism here), bought a ton of omiyage (it's hard to know what to buy, so I bought everything), saw rice being pounded with giant wooden mallets to make rice cakes for the festival, and stayed at a pension style hotel called cotton 100% The family style hospitality gives you the feeling of 100% cotton.