Journey to the West: Nara

Pics of Nara are here.  There are fewer and they're all portrait-oriented because my actual camera crapped out as we were leaving Kyoto and I took all of these with my cell phone.  

Nara was a very rural area, especially compared to the rest of the places we went during the course of the weekend. (Miyajima was by no means urban, but it had a different feel that I wouldn't use 'rural' to describe, idk.) It was pretty cold there, and you could still see the snow on the mountains around it.

So the thing Nara's famous for is deer. There are freaking deer everywhere. So the first thing we did was walk to the deer park to see all the deer. We wandered around there for a while, feeding the deer and watching the fear in the eyes of people who had also bought crackers for the deer and were being mobbed by them. My roommate thought the deer were literally the cutest thing on God's earth; I heard "Ooooh, over here Shika-chan!" more times that day than I could count (shika means deer). They were cute - I just wasn't as enthralled with them as she was.

After hanging with the deer for a while we checked out the Kasuga Taisha shrine, which is a Shinto shrine that's a ridiculous amount of centuries old. It was really impressive but it was a relatively long walk to get to the shrine from the road, and it had started to rain a little. We stopped in a souvenir shop and had lunch before heading on. The shrine had immense grounds and was really cool, but at this point I was starting to think that if you've seen a few Shinto shrines, you've seen them all - there isn't much variety in architecture and stuff, which is why places like Fushimi-Inari that I mentioned in my last entry are so exciting.

At that point I wanted to see the Buddhist temple as well, (we were on a bit of a timeline, as we were supposed to meet in Osaka to check into the hotel there at a certain time) so we headed back to the road and towards Todaiji where the giant Vairocana Buddha statue is. It's the largest in the world (15m/50ft tall) and was really incredibly impressive. Pictures really don't do it justice-it was really quite breathtaking in real life. There was also a slightly smaller statue of the Goddess of Mercy aka the Bodhisattva Kannon/Guanyin/Kanzeon Botatsu/Avalokitesavara (she has a lot of different names). Of all the figures I know of in the traditions of other religions, Guanyin is my favorite ever, so I was pretty excited.

At this point it was still raining, and I had made the terrible choice of wearing pants that dragged on the ground a little. This wouldn't have been a problem except for the deer - where there are hundreds of deer there is a a metric fuckton of deer poop, unfortunately, and it mixed with the water on the ground to form a nasty poop-mud that made my pants wet to about mid-shin. We headed back to the station after seeing the Buddha so I could change into my other pair of jeans (stopping briefly so I could buy a shinsengumi headband) and then bought tickets and hopped on the train to Osaka.