Day Twenty One: Nara

nara is a city known for many different things.

along with Kyoto and the other cities of the kansai area, it was preserved from being blown up or burned by folks during the second world war. most of the temples that have been there for hundreds of years still stand and the city is a plethora of old architecture, monuments and artifacts.

I loved it from the moment I saw it.

I ate some food in the café next door to the guest house. mayumi owns the café and makes great food.

nara is also known for having deer that just walk around like they own the place, and I pretty much reckon they do.


they're everywhere. they roam the streets, they steal peoples food, they carry guns and knives and steal women's purses. there have even been reports of deer splinter groups that have become pirates and attack ships.

I had my own encounter with one of these deer.

I was just walking through the park minding my own business, shooting the breeze, ya know?

then this deer walks up to me, of course acting like hes got no hidden agenda.

we get to talking a little bit. I tell him i'm just visiting the area, looking at the sights.

he asks for some food, I tell him I don’t have any but if I did I would probably let him share some of mine.

that wasn’t a good enough answer for him.

this deer reaches into my back pocket while i'm turned around walking away and pulls out my map of nara and starts eating it. I try to pull it out of his mouth but he wont let go. I kept yelling at him to give it back.


all these little kids are laughing at the foreigner who is being antagonized by this deer, and eventually this old lady comes over with a metal stick and started hitting it until it finally gave me back my map. the deer ate the bottom part of the map, but luckily it wasn’t a big deal. he had eaten the Kyoto section and not the nara one.


but I bet he got away thinking he had really shown me up, he was wrong.

all I could say was “oh dear, oh deer, oh dear, oh deer.”

there are cars that roam around making sure nobody is bothering the deer. they make sure people give the deer lots of food to keep them strong.

I found my way to the building that houses the daibutsu, the big Buddha, or nara.

you may remember that there is one of these sitting around in kamakura that everybody decides to go to because its so conveniently located south of Tokyo.

what they don’t realize is that there is a much cooler one sitting in nara, in a big beautiful shrine.

I got lots of pictures of this guy, after all, he is Buddha, a very important part of lots of peoples spiritual beliefs.


as it turns out, you can't walk inside this Buddha. the daibutsu in kamakura is hollow, and for about 30yen you can walk inside, take pictures, or hide from your teacher while you kiss the cute girl in your fourth grade class on a school field trip.

I know…because I saw it. I was there man, I was there.

but the daibustu here, in my opinion, was much better than the other. it was big....real big.

as was the case with many things in nara. they seemed to be more beautiful in some kind of a way. maybe the deer had something to do with it.


there were also groups of school kids that were there. lots and lots of them. one group in particular had it written into their assignment for the day to practice English phrases on someone who spoke it.

so they came to me in swarms. sixth grade Japanese children with yellow hats everywhere, asking me questions in English and sometimes not understanding the answers I gave back. then the best part was they had to get the foreigner to sign this page in the book proving they had actually talked to me.


it was pretty cool.

after spending the day seeing the sights, I went to a store and bought some senbei, Japanese crackers made from rice, and sat outside the store at a table.

this old man came up and started talking with me, sometimes in English, sometimes in Japanese, and he kept telling me he was a “hen na nohonjin” and he was still ”sukebe” even after all these years. we got to talking for a while until a 25-year-old girl showed up. she was pregnant and claimed she had a husband, somewhere, but this old guy kept referring to her as “my young”.

it was kind of weird, but he bought me takoyaki and we sat there and ate it together.

I asked him if he thought the girl that worked at the takoyaki stand was cute. he looked at me for a couple seconds, got up and walked over to the stand to tell her I was in love with her, which at the time was not true.

his “young” told me that he was just over there cause he thought I liked her and he didn’t want me to steal the takoyaki girl from him.

after a couple minutes, I got up and left him and his young to the takoyaki girl.