Central Japan: Day 5

Uji and Nara

Uji River

Absolutely the most beautiful skies I've seen all week...even if it was accompanied by the coldest temperatures.  Started the day off in Uji City, just south of Kyoto.  I went to see the freshly renovated Byōdō-in Buddhist temple.

The city is also known as a center of tea production and had a number of green tea products available in the shop-lined streets leading from the station to the temple.  They had everything, from tea leaves to tea powder to hand cream to cookies to ice cream cones...to these green tea chewy rice balls:

Matcha dango (chewy rice balls)

Back on the train. My next stop was Nara, Japan's first permanent capital city and also a center for all things Buddhism.  It's also famous for the deer that walk freely throughout the Nara Park World Heritage site. In Shinto religion, deer are considered divine messengers and in Nara, the deer themselves are a symbol of the city as well as a protected "national treasure".  And according to the sign that greets you upon entry to the park, it looks like that special status has gone to their heads.

Today's Japanese lesson.  Also, this sign suggests that deer are
particularly aggressive towards elderly women and small girls.  Jerks.

They sell packets of shika-sembe (specially made crackers for deer) all around the park, and the deer can identify in a heartbeat anyone who's got some.  And they'll head-butt anyone that they suspect is holding out on them.  I almost got my camera stolen by a deer who was brazen enough to stick her nose in my coat pocket just to make absolutely certain that I was cracker-less.  I watched another deer stick her head right into a man's open briefcase.  Anything that looks like it might possibly contain crackers, and these animals have no shame.  When I did have crackers I learned pretty quickly to pop one into their mouth and keep walking.  If you stand still to watch them eat, you risk being trampled.

The deer in the foreground has a cracker in its mouth, and you can see
the vendor's table with stacks of crackers directly behind the woman.

Then the main attraction: the Tōdai-ji Buddhist temple complex and its Daibutsu (Great Buddha statue).

Even if you don't get trampled by deer, you're probably equally likely to get trampled by swarms of schoolchildren.

Daibutsu

Followed the temple with a walk through the park.  Got interviewed by several groups of junior high school students.  When they go on school trips, teachers occasionally make their students seek out foreigners to speak to in English.  Today they were from Gifu, where I happened to have been this past Sunday (see Day 1).  They had just a few sentences that they'd memorized and a couple of questions to ask me, before requesting that I sign my name in their notebooks.  Felt like a celebrity handing out autographs...

Nara Park

Next stop was Kōfuku-ji:

The pagoda at Kōfuku-ji

Twilight behind the South Octagonal Hall

Last stop was a shabu-shabu restaurant that is run by the mother of a guy who manages my favorite local eatery in Tokyo.  Even though it is somewhat common Japanese fare, this was my first shabu-shabu experience.  In a restaurant, you are given plates of raw vegetables and meat, a bowl of dipping sauce (sesame, in this case), and a pot of boiling water.  You drop the veggies in to boil for a few minutes, but the meat you just pick up with chopsticks and drag through the water a few times until it's cooked, which usually takes just a few seconds.  Then meat and vegetables are dipped in the sauce.  Soooo good; I'm going to have to find one of these places in Tokyo...

Full of food and worn out, I boarded a train back to Osaka.  One more day in Kyoto tomorrow!