After Gion, the three of us went back to our hotel and decided we'd sleep in the next morning. We have to wake up early all the time for our jobs, and this was vacation damnit! We were gonna sleep in and assume we would wake up at a decent hour!
We woke up at 11:30. Oops.
I love drink bars.
After a leisurely lunch at everyone's favorite family diner Gusto, we made it to Nara by about 2pm. We grabbed some visitor information pamphlets and made our way towards... cultural stuff. All the good tourist spots are in one general direction away from the station, so if you walk far enough you'll find a World Heritage site or something like that.
We happened to run into a few deer, some pagodas, and eventually a really really really big Buddha statue.
Why do the deer only go after grandmas and little girls???
On the way to the Daibutsu was a road lined with matsuri-type food stalls, where you will find some of the best food ever. This one had pretty standard stuff - yaki-whatever (soba, tori, meat), various sweets, soft cream, okonomiyaki, etc. I grabbed barbeque chicken on a stick, corn, and matcha + vanilla soft cream.
Kevin opted for beer.
And then we got to Hotoke-sama! I have said this before but HE REALLY DOES PUT THE DAI IN DAIBUTSU. According to Wikipedia, which is always correct and completely factual, the current building that houses the Daibutsu is 30% smaller than the old one. I honestly have no idea how they built a structure almost one-third larger than the one that is already there, it is immense.
Every Japanese person I've spoken to about my visit to the Daibutsu has asked me about the hole pictured above. There is probably some great legend that goes with it, but basically if you can crawl through this random hole in a pillar you'll have good fortune. Or live a long life. Or marry one of the boys in JE (if you crawl through it 100 times you'll marry Jun Matsumoto). I don't know. If you'll notice here's a line at least 50 people long in the background, which was not appealing in the least, and the parents of the kids in this photo were taking pictures of each of their children in the pillar, making everyone else in line pretty upset.
[TANGENT: I'm generally not a fan of these kind of tourist gimmicks. This one in particular reminded me of (though is not nearly as bad as) The Blarney Stone in Ireland, where you have to walk up through these ruins of a castle, get in line behind dozens of other tourists, allow your body to hang over the edge of the top of the castle, and perform an epic sit-up in order to kiss the very nondescript "stone" that probably has the germs of millions of other people's spit on it.]
Around 6pm we decided we'd had our fill of Nara for the day and headed back to Kyoto. We got lucky by catching a rapid train to Nara, about a 45 minute journey, but weren't so lucky going back. I think it took us about an hour and 15 minutes (possibly longer) to get back to Kyoto, though it wasn't so bad since we all slept through it.
Look forward to okonomiyaki dinner, losing my wallet, a big gold temple in the water, and fewer pictures next post~
LOLOLOL I should have crawled through that 100 times then... I'm not married to Matsujun yet! D: My friend crawled through it lolol she is SO small so she could do it haha
ReplyDeleteDaibutsu was really cool! I enjoyed going ^^ Since I was staying in Osaka, I rarely saw ANY foreigners (SRSLY) so it was interesting to see them all gathered at places like this, of course xDDD
Omg I am terrified of that hole. I swear, the idea of getting stuck in it is just... wow. No thank you. Last time I went to Kyoto and saw it there was like an entire middle school crawling through it and I felt so bad for the fat kids cuz some of them couldn't get through and everyone laughed D:
ReplyDelete@xanny I know what you mean about the foreigners! We have quite a few more in Tokyo, but they're still few and far between. Like I get excited if I see another gaijin at Hachiko LOL.
ReplyDelete@caroline It didn't look that small (that's what she said lololol) that a fat kid couldn't get through it! That sucks for them :( How is that pillar still useful with such a big part of it missing, anyway?
Ahhh....NARA!! I loved that place! Did you go to that little tea house in the backstreets behind the temple? bte Are you on JET?
ReplyDelete@chococcuro I think we might've passed by that teahouse but they were closing up shop by the time we saw it :( I teach English for a private company, not JET. I wanted to do JET but it's too competitive these days and the vast majority of applicants don't get interviews.
ReplyDeleteThe MatsuJun comment made me LOL
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that's what it was about, I went there and I saw a bunch of teenage boys playing in it and I thought "boys will be boys" XD