I do not know if any of my coffee shop friends are reading this blog, but I found this coffee roaster in Nara. I thought it was pretty cool and is definitely more ghetto than the one at Uncommon Grounds.
So Nara is famous for a lot of things, but mostly deer. They are everywhere and they are all wild. They do not mind people and are almost completely domestic. Seriously these deer are everywhere. I am surprised there are not hundreds of deer lying dead at the side of the road. These deer own this town.
There are these vendors all over the place selling some sort of crackers for tourist to feed the deer.
Instead of buying crackers to feed the deer this guy brought a bag of old lettuce.
Jason likes to be a jerk every once in a while and here he is being a jerk to this deer. To be fair though these deers are kind of jerks. When you start to feed them they just start rubbing up against you to get more crackers. When this happens deer just start flocking around which means there are places where there are literally hundreds of deer in a small area. The deer are mostly tame, but I actually saw a girl, about 20 yrs old, get kicked in the back. She did not get kicked hard and she was fine, but it was kind of shocking to see. The girl was squatting and fell over and surprised a near by deer.
This is the largest wooden structure in the world. It needs to be big because it holds a huge Buddha statue.
These pictures do not really capture how large the Buddha is. Jason has pictures of me standing in front of it, which gives it some scale.
This statue was outside of the huge wooden structure and was pretty creepy. You are supposed to put money it the box at his feet and the rub him. You then rub a part of your body that is sore and it will make it feel better. I rubbed by baby legs and it might have worked, but I do not think so.
Giant bell. Jason and I are not really impressed by giant bells. I get why they are cool, but they are just kind of "meh" to me.
Here is me at my grossest. The ice cream on the left was a sesame flavored ice cream and the orange one is melon. They were both good, but I preferred the melon.
Nara is filled with little temples and shrines and it nice running into them and just wandering around.
Here is Jason feeding one of the deer in Nara. After a day with the deer we headed back to Osaka.
This is Osaka-Jo which is a castle in the middle of the city.
Crooked picture of the Osaka-Jo.
View from Osaka-Jo.
This is a better shot of the castle. There is a museum inside, but it mostly fun for the whole going to a castle and seeing how difficult it must be to attack this without gunpowder or airplanes.
More Omelet rice from Nara.
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This is my first time getting Ramen in Japan. It is really good and so much different from what American think of as Ramen.
Another view from Osaka-Jo. I guess I am really bad at ordering the photos because they are always out of order. I am not as good as this blogging thing as Jason.
Jason has to hold my hand and take me all over Japan because I am a giant baby and he still needs to work at the same time. Here he is doing stuff on his laptop on our way back to Tokyo on the bullet train. A bullet train is just a really fast train that goes between Tokyo and Osaka and Kyoto. What would normally be a 6-8 hour bus ride was only a 2 hour train ride. Pretty convenient, but also pretty expensive. This is the end of this leg of the trip. From here on out will just be Tokyo.
