18-kippu Trip: Nara

It’s been a month since I last wrote on my blog. I’ve been busy these days, and I will be too. But anyway, I will try to write down about my trip in March before I forget about it.

In the afternoon of the second day of my 18-kippu trip, we went to Nara after visiting Kyoto for one and a half day. We arrived at Nara Station at about 4pm, and we intended to visit Todaiji Temple to see the big Buddha statue there, but it was too late, the temple would be closed at 5 pm, so we didn’t have enough time to go there. There was an information center in Nara Station, we asked for a map of Nara so that we could still go around in Nara.

Besides the Big Buddha statue (大仏), Nara is also famous for its deer. There was Nara Park, where we could find deer living there and we could even approach them. I approached some of them and touched them. The deer were very excited when people came to them with something they thought as food. I didn’t bring any deer food, I was just holding a map and stretched out my hands hoping that the deer would come closer. But the deer thought that the map I was holding was food, and indeed, it came closer to me and ate the map in my hand. I was surprised, and so were my friends. We tried to take the map back, but we couldn’t. That made us got lost in Nara, since we didn’t have any other maps anymore.

So we just walked around in Nara Park, and we approached another group of deer in the park. I tried to touch the deer again, and they let me touch them. I also took some pictures with them. The deer which I took picture with was moving around, so I tried to catch up with it. I didn’t know why, but suddenly it just struck me with its head right on my belly. It didn’t hurt at all, because their horns were already cut down so that they couldn’t harm people.

Then we continued to walk around and arrived at Ukimi-do (a hexagonal gazebo) built over Sagi Pond in Nara Park. We just took some photos there, and went back to Nara Station. We didn’t spend much time in Nara, and at that night we went to Osaka and stayed in Osaka for several days.

On our way back to the station, we accidentally found some souvenir shops. The price of the souvenirs was not very expensive, so we bought some souvenirs there. I got a deer doll which could make some sound, and my friend gave it  a name, “Rusaana Limuria”.