Tuesday - Day 5 - Nara

I activated my Japan Rail pass this morning so set off on my first out of town adventure - and in the grand scheme of things I didn't go too far. I caught the JP loop to Kyobashi and then the rapid train an hour down the line to Kizu, and then ended up catching a local train two stops down to a place called Nara. I was impressed that I managed to navigate without much English but I'm mainly memorising symbols and word structures and just looking for the same symbols on maps and trains! Nara is a pretty unremarkable town when you approach it but the beauty lies in it's parks situated about a ten minute walk through the shops and towards the hills. My first impressions were that it was damn hot and I bet Tom was glad that he didn't have to listen to me bitch and moan about the heat today. I hadn't eaten before I left as I was in a bit of a rush and so popped into a Lawsons (like a Spar) and found the king of all snacks - banana bread (picture to follow!) and pizza flavoured crisps. Not exactly typical japanese snacks but I'd not be exaggerating if I said that I'd happily only eat those two snacks for the rest of my life.

The town was pretty shabby and sold all the usual crap and then out of the blue you come across a huge pond with terrapins and giant kio karp swimming around in it, which was pretty surreal. Just left of this I climbed a set of stairs and come across a huge seven story tall pagoda and what I thought was hundreds of school kids playing with deer...on closer inspection it was hundreds of school kids playing with very tame deer. The deer roam the parks and you can feed them for 150 yen but this just seemed to encourage them to follow you, the japanese kids seem to like doing this but then screamed whenever they got too close. Many of the school kids found me fascinating too as I was out of about 10 white people in the whole city today and so I stood out like a sore thumb - I think being the only person wearing sunglasses didn't help matters much! Once you'd walked through this park you had roughly about 1km further to walk up the hill before arriving at a much larger park on the other side of the road and what seemed like thousands of school children. Tōdai-ji is situated within this park and its actually the worlds largest wooden building - and its pretty damn impressive. It sounds like one of those dull school trips where you've gotta be all pumped up and then you turn up and it sucks a big one...but the sheer size and scale of the building was something to be seen. It's 500 yen to enter the building and this seemed worth it even if it did only contain this 15 metre high buddha and a few smaller statues but it really does leave you speechless when you first see it. I say speechless, I'm fairly sure I mouthed "fuck me" when I first saw it.