Monday April 16 - Kyoto / Nara

Our day started with a hunt for a convenience store breakfast. I got an apple and melon-pan, which was good, but I really wanted to get a fresh-baked one. Liz got some sort of spongecake cupcake and mandarin oranges in jelly, and we shared a strawberry milk. We took the instructions a guy from church had written yesterday to a Lawson worker in an attempt to get Hanshin Tigers tickets. He started working the ticket machine, but told us it was sold out. I was extremely disappointed for a few minutes, but then thought, I'll bet it's not really sold out. I got some help from the hostel clerk and indeed, it wasn't sold out. I just had to go to a Circle K to get my tickets printed.

Kyoto Station

That accomplished, it was now time for today's main event, Nara. We went to the station first looked for a Circle K. After making a lap around the station (it's big), we determined we couldn't find it. We hopped on a JR track to wait for our train.

Now, we had seen lots of vending machines and noticed one that had a can with a picture of corn on it. Our curiosity piqued, we bought a can. To our surprise the can was hot. It turned out to be hot creamed corn in a can. How novel!


After a 45 minute train ride we arrived at Nara. It's a bigger city than I expected. We started walking east to Nara Park, where most of the sights are. We knew we were close when we started seeing deer. Nara is famous for them.

First deer sighting

What a couple of buttheads.

Awww.

Our first stop was the five-story pagoda. We then walked through a torii and took a meandering route through a pond area. We found a beautiful pond with a gazebo, surrounded by blossoming cherry trees. There were two couples there taking wedding photos, one in traditional Japanese clothing the other more western (who were actually taking their own pictures).

Count 'em, five.

The pond

Hanami!

Newlyweds

Slightly less newlyweds

We walked further east and found a lady selling roasted sweet potatoes by the path. We decided, why not? So we bought and ate one. It was delicious.

I heartily endorse this product or event

We next headed north through probably the busiest corridor of the park. We decided to feed the remaining scraps of sweet potato to the deer. They completely mobbed me, and one of them stole and ate a piece of paper in my back pocket. I hope it wasn't important.

We paid entry for the temple of Todai-ji, and it was worth it. It's a huge wooden temple, purportedly the largest wooden building in the world. I don't think photos will properly capture the scale of it. The buddha inside is also huge and impressive. I was amused by one of the wooden pillars inside, which had a hole just large enough to fit through. Of course I squeezed through.

Todai-ji

This was probably the most impressive temple we saw in our trip

Hey.

It probably would've been easier to just walk around

I wonder if anybody's been stuck in this...

Next up came our quest for lunch. We couldn't find anything we liked in the tourist area, so we went back downtown and settled on some bento. Honestly they weren't great, but they were good enough. We saw a Circle K and got our baseball tickets inside, mission accomplished!

We meandered through a residential part of Nara and found another interesting vending machine item: canned flan. We tried it and while it wasn't the greatest flan ever it was still good. Oh, the things you find in vending machines here.

It's flantastic!

We knew it would kill us but we decided to go back into the park to see the Kasuga shinto temple. The temple itself was cool, but what I really liked were the huge number of stone lanterns lining the path.

Now, we had been carrying a garbage bag with our trash from lunch this whole time. Why, you ask? Well, there are very few public trash cans in Nara. Recycling bins you can find, but there was not a single trash can from Nara park all the way to the train station. It felt great to finally be rid of it on the train platform.

Upon arriving at our hostel, we crashed for a little while. We later left the room to go back to the Kyoto station area. We went to the 100 yen store. Turns out it's the same store from Westlake Center, Daiso. Nothing really tickled our fancy so we crossed the river to a restaurant called Manzo. We both had some form of udon noodles, and they were delicious.

We stumbled back to our hostel and ended our day. I managed to stay awake until 9:00 PM, and then I was out.

Two of the finest things in life!