July 6th (Day 10)

Exploring Nara

I got up early the next morning and drank some green tea while playing with my camera. The menus were in japanese but to my relief I soon found a setting to change them to english. Afterwards I spent most of my time playing with the settings and taking pictures of my feet and the ceiling.

While playing around in the morning I heard A calling softly at the door and let him in. We synchronized settings on my camera before heading out to take some pictures before breakfast.

We wandered through the building taking pictures. The hotel, like most temples and other public places had buckets of water available for dousing fires. I wonder how often they come in handy and how much of a pain it is to refill or clean them all the time. I also saw a man pushing a cart filled with houseplants replacing all the potted plants on each floor. I didn't really see anything wrong with the ones he was replacing but maybe they just needed to get outside into the air.

Thick red carpet and old fashioned radiator

The hotel was built like a castle.

They had go tables in the resting room

Fancy inlaid chair A model of the tower down the street

"In commemoration of the marriage of the crown prince" "Mujinzo" It means limitless

High ceilings in our fancy rooms

This clock commemorates the current emperor taking the throne. On December 1 of 2nd year of Heisei (1990) both the emperor and the empress paid a visit to this hotel. The empress liked the chime that plays every 15 minutes and she went to the trouble to listen to is on the day they left.

The nara hotel has been host to the emperor in the past and they had many pictures on the wall commemorating the event. After exhausting our picture taking opportunities in the hotel, we walked outside and followed the path we took the night before to take some pictures of the temples, bridges, and lakes. Again I think the pictures can speak better than I can.

Picturesque bridge with deer Narrow alley satellite dish hidden under ivy

Scenic tower down the street Scenic pool before before heading to the camera shop

They were preparing another large temple in this area This church is run by the hotel

Sarusawa pond (monkey stream pond)

Kofukuji temple

Nara is known for it's population of deer and they are protected by local law. We saw them all over the place and at some of the sights they've become really tame.

What a cute kitty sleeping on a small shrine! ...um....nevermind.

When we checked in the night before I had the option of having a Japanese or a western breakfast prepared the next morning. After a lot of thinking, I chose the japanese breakfast and I'm extremely glad I did. The food was fantastic; rice with nori and soy sauce, miso soup with mucus, squash, sweet potato, some really tasty fish in a citrus sauce and green tea. Shamara had the western breakfast and it was barren in comparison.

View from the breakfast table. Na's elaborate and tasty breakfast. Shamara's drab and yuccky breakfast.

Na eating a japanese breakfast (38.9MB)

We met our talkative taxi driver again and drove out to the oldest standing temple in japan. On the way we drove past several crowded apartment buildings surrounded by rice fields. Akira explained the japanese had adopted the english word 'mansion' to describe these buildings. They were everywhere. Also, while driving to the site, we were passed by a small pickup truck with an elaborate gold shell. Akira explained it was some sort of hearse.

A mansion A hearse?

Calcium chloride, antifreeze, anti-dust granules The cube. ricefields outside the city

Horyuji temple (the oldest still standing)

Horyuji temple was built by Prince Shotoku in 607. Prince Shotoku was supposedly able to listen to 7 people talk at the same time. Pictures were allowed outside but you couldn't take photographs inside the buildings. Whether this was out of respect for their religious idols, because flash photography and tripods annoy other tourists, or because they could sell more postcards in the souvenir shops I don't know. The Buddha in the main temple was the largest I had seen yet. He was flanked by two other lesser Buddhas and four guardians stood at the corners with their telltale weapons. Each guard stood upon the body of a vanquished foe. The quality of the wooden carvings was excellent. The taller towers in the area were covered with figured carved in wood; grotesque fat men holding beams and dragons coiled around pillars.

He's saying "A" He's saying "Um"

Looking it up later, I learned the four guardians to buddha are known as the heavenly kings, Tamonten, Jikokuten, Koumokuten, and Zouchoten. They are trampling Jyaki. We saw these same characters in several of the temples we visited.

There was a museum off of the first courtyard filled with lots of very old things(TM) including some nifty wooden statues of Buddha's buddies and paper scrolls 1300 years old. I asked A if he could read the symbols (they were very distinct but I was wondering if the symbols had changed over the centuries) and he said for the most part yes.

Inside the darker buildings the caretakers/guards had flashlights that could be used to illuminate the statues within. The entire temple complex we were walking through was gigantic. After going through the museum, we walked down a long causeway and into a small building filled with benches for resting out of the sun. There was also a drink dispenser where you could get hot green tea and water. I chose a little water first because I was very sweaty and extremely parched but I found it to be boiling hot. Dumping it out, I tried the tea. The machine filled my cup much too full and it was also scalding hot. I burned my fingers before I could find someplace to rest the overfull cup and then burned my tongue trying to sip it. In the end I abandoned it altogether and continued touristing. It was a cruel cruel joke.

We checked out a few more temples in the complex and took many more pictures of roof tiles. Our driver met us at the last site. He was completely unabashed about driving up onto the sidewalk and was parked in the walkway right in front of the last temple building. We got in the taxi and he drove us to the site of the largest Buddha in japan.

The gate for the delivery boy

We took lots of pictures of roof tiles

Todaiji temple

Todaiji temple was built by emperor Shomu around 728 and the building where the huge Buddha currently sits was rebuilt in the 18th century. We had seen the temple building while driving in the night before but it was difficult to get a sense of scale until you were actually looking at it. It's freakin enormous. I try to imagine how much wood was required to build it but it's mind boggling. Apparently the temple was rebuilt in 1200 after the previous structure burned down and was now slightly smaller. The fire that burned down the first temple must have been extremely impressive. There were thousands of students visiting the shrine when we arrived.

Inside the gigantic double doors is a Buddha 16m high. It's difficult to relay the size of the statue using pictures. There was a flowering plant beside him which towered 15-20' high and had butterflies on the vase about the size of chair. It was too dark and large to easily take pictures. They didn't allow tripods so most of the long exposure pictures were taken while leaning against pillars. The Buddha was flanked on both sides by lesser Buddhas and two enormous heavenly kings were standing on either side. The woodwork on these statues was amazing.

Freaking Gigantic!

At the base of one of the massive pillars was a hole that is supposedly the size of the statues nostril. If you crawled through this opening you would have something good happen - Akira was uncertain about the details. We watched some schoolchildren crawl through. I don't think I would've fit - it was slightly too narrow for my manly and well-muscled shoulders.

After the temple we wandered outside to the take pictures of the coy, deer, and turtles in the park outside. There were women selling cookies for the deer and hundreds of students buying them and getting chased around.

Deer poop for sale

We didn't have enough time to see another temple (and I was beginning to get burned out on beautiful temple architecture so our driver dropped us off in a local park to wander around until we could take the train back. We were relatively close to the place where I bought my camera so we wandered over and explored down one of the shop-lined side-streets. I bought some noodles and octopus balls for lunch and the most masculine purse I could find for a camera bag.

These claimed to be giant buddha boogers Shamara and the colonel

After a little driving around (through a forest I wish we had been dropped off in instead) we caught the train to Kyoto. Mieko accidentally made the mistake of buying tickets for the 16th instead of the 6th. When we got on the train and took our seats several businessmen wandered in and contested our reserved seats. I showed him my ticket (this was before we realized our mistake) and he apologized and moved farther back.

Shamara, A, and M were sitting apart from me so I was alone when the ticket taker came up checking tickets. He immediately caught the date problem and I was in the process of trying to gesture that he should talk to A or M to get an explanation, when A ran up and rescued me. It was apparently alright that we had the wrong tickets - I guess because the car wasn't full...?

The car we were in was uncrowded and nice. It turns our M purchased two tickets for us for our ride back to Kyoto; one was a regular ticket good to get us to Kyoto and the other was an upgrade that allowed us to sit in the nicer car. There were other, more crowded, double decker cars behind the one we got into.

The bullet train back to Tokyo goes by Mt Fuji but it was too hazy on the way out to Kyoto and too dark to see it on the way back. We arrived in Tokyo at 8:30 and it was 9:45 when we finally got back to the house. Upon arriving, M had A clean the wheels of our luggage and she had a small cleaning episode where she crawled around on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a wet cloth.

After getting off the bullet train we had to take some local trains out of Tokyo. It was relatively late so we beat most of the rush (S wasn't interested in going through another experience like the one when had when we left) but it was still very crowded. At each stop more and more businessmen crowded into the train and it was beginning to look ugly when the train stopped and waited at a station to fix it's schedule (it had been running fast). There was another train already waiting when we pulled in and it was going in the same direction. Though we were only going to be stopped for two minutes, a bunch of businessmen got off our train and absolutely crammed themselves into the other one making our train much more comfortable as a result. I can't understand putting up with the uncomfortable crush for 30-40 minutes in order to save 2 minutes of commute time and I suspect Japanese have a different sense of personal space than I do.