Nara

This morning Riley woke up at 3:45–a bit on the early side, but since we went to bed around 8 we didn’t mind all that much. She was in a great mood but a bit chatty, so we took her down the hall to the room where we ate dinner the night before and fed her breakfast: banana, strawberry, and orange. Served in a (clean!) ashtray. She went back to sleep around 5:30 and we were able to catch a few more minutes of sleep before the call to prayer at 6.

The ceremony was about 45 minutes long, and consisted mainly of four monks chanting (although one of them showed up late, and seemed to get off to a slow start… kept rubbing his eyes and looked very sleepy). There were 10 or 15 other guests there sitting on a bench along the back of the room. A Japanese couple sat on the mat in front of us, and at one point were brought to the front of the room by one of the monks to do some special prayer thing (we couldn’t really see, but they came back with a bunch of paper bits). At one point the guy took a picture (and earned an elbow and look from his wife).

We made it to Nara around noon. First order of business: ATM. At the second bank ATM we tried a man rushed up and asked to see our card. Brad showed him the VISA, Star, etc. logos on it and he whipped out a hand-drawn (but laminated) map directing us around the corder to the ATM at the quick-e-mart-type place, and then another sheet showing a color picture of the store’s sign (it was about 40 feet away). Apparently we weren’t the first tourists to try to use their ATM. It turns out its kind of hard to find an ATM in Japan that is compatible with US ATM cards. Even the ones that say VISA don’t always work right.

Anyway, we got some lunch (we were all starving–including Riley)…

…then started our tour of all the temples. We quickly ran into the deer that seem to inhabit most of the city. They’re incredibly tame, and come right up to you to see if you have any of the funny flat cakes everyone sells to feed them. They’re also pretty mangey (it looks like they’ve pulled half of their coat out with their teeth itching at fleas or something nasty) so there’s no real desire to touch them (even though you could). Riley thought they were pretty exciting (“dog! dog!”), and seemed to be less afraid of them than actual dogs.

The coolest temple we saw was apparently the largest wooden structure in the world, and was built to house the largest Buddha statue. Although actually there were three huge Buddhas inside–I’m not sure how the other two measured up, but they were still pretty freakin big. Riley was in a great mood (as long as she was walking) and making lots of friends with the zillions of school children (mainly the girls) who swarmed the place. You’d hear them approaching by the flood of “kawaii!” which means “cute.” Riley is getting much better at handling the attention from strangers… she didn’t seem to mind when people touched her cheek and toward the end was doing a lot of waving back at them. Go Riley! Making lots of friends.

Eventually we were able to coax her to sleep (she was long past her naptime, but there were so many noisy children and deer/dogs to distract her) and covered her up in her stroller for the last few places. We found soft-serve ice cream (green tea! I liked it, Elise thought it tasted like soap) and just after the last temple wandered into a parking lot full of buses, one of which was leaving for the JR train station in ten minutes. We’re not quite sure if our rail passes covered the bus fare, but the guy waved us on (without really even looking at them). Which was great: we’d walked a long way, it was drizzling again, and our feet were pretty tired.

By the time we got to Kyoto we were all pretty tired. We checked into the Kyoto Century Hotel (which is conveniently right next to the train station), then went on a mission to find food for Riley at the supermarket. We found little pull-top cans of peas, corn and beans, as well as bananas (in individual bags, the japanese sure love their packaging) and strawberries and sun-dried tomato bread (at least that’s what we think it was, it had a really strong flavor, but Riley really liked it) and some other stuff. We also bought a little birthday cake, that was packaged in a box with a little dry ice compartment, pretty cool.

There are also tons more Nara pictures.