Oh deer

Today we opted to head out first thing in the morning for Nara, about an hour from Kyoto. I was pretty excited about the abundance of temples and the park itself, but I think we were both most interested in checking out the sacred deer. The nice thing about Nara is that you sort of just get out of the train station and walk north until you run into the park. Once inside the park it is just a big loop to check out all kinds of awesomeness everywhere you look.

The first temple we ran into was the Kofukuji, a moderately sized rather attractive temple with a pagoda across an open field. The pagoda was really impressive at 5 stories and this was our first interaction with the deer. These little dudes are everywhere and the only thing the deer outnumber are the vendors selling deer cookies. We opted to hold off on feeding the little fellas until we had a chance to check out more of the park.

Walking through the park we passed the Nara National Museum, which we opted to skip, and headed straight for Todaiji Temple. The largest buddha in Japan is housed here, which should have given us a heads up on how big the building might be. It was quite a surprise, however, as we crossed a deer filled walkway and looked up to see the enormous gate leading to the temple. The gate alone would have been impressive, or the fantastically huge wooden statues inside the gate, but that all went out the door when we got our first glimpse of the temple itself - this thing was huge! There is a lot of open space around the temple, which affords you lots of great views as you make your way there. Once inside we were pleasantly surprised by the signs saying you could photograph the buddha, a first for us. This dude was gigantic. We saw an unbelievable huge buddha in China, but he was standing and was situated in such a way that you really couldn’t see all of him at once. Seeing this enormous seated buddha was quite a site, and I just kept saying “geez, that thing really is big.”

From Todaiji we headed to the northernmost part of the park and Kasuga Shrine. This part of the park was probably the best because you begin climbing a hill covered in trees with stone lanterns lining the walk. Every corner you turned there seemed to be more to look at and it definitely kept my camera busy.

Heading back down the hill we decided it was time to feed the deer, so Sommer bought some cookies and we found a group of nice looking fellas. Unfortunately there was one aggressive gang leader type who went straight for the cookies and used his antlers to hook Sommer under the elbow to force her hand. Sommer did her best to feed the other deer, but this guy was having none of it. As Sommer turned her back he decided he’d show her and snagged our map from her purse and promptly devoured it. What a punk! Luckily we were close enough to the park exit that we found our way out, but I was afraid we’d be having to try to look down his throat for directions.

We grabbed a quick lunch of udon and fried rice and then hopped a painfully slow train back to Kyoto. It seemed like every stop was 10 minutes, which really made it a haul. We also ran into our first train hiccup when we got lost at the Kyoto station trying to locate our hotel shuttle. We have been fortunate enough to always exit on the same side of the station, so when we popped out on the opposite side we were doomed. This is the second largest station here, so getting lost is pretty easy. After some fiddling about we finally wound up on the correct side and were headed back to our hotel. 

Check out the photos from today.