Sam in Japan: 6/14 Nara

So these days are getting busier and busier! It's a bit harder to find time to update, so please excuse me for these late posts :)

Yesterday we headed off to Nara, which about an hour drive on the bus. Nara is the place where I've probably been the most excited for, mainly because of the deer. I read beforehand that the deer in Nara know how to bow, and will bow to you in order to get food.

Well, the deer definitely delivered!

After getting some lunch at the supermarket (and me getting some food for my mom - something with tentacles 😋), we headed off to this park with a tour guide. This park had a bunch of temples, shrines, and deer, and the deer were so cute! The tour guide instructed us to hold up their food in the air and wait until they bowed three times. The deer would fast walk towards you if you had food, and if you held the food up they would hastily bow and look at you expectantly. Here are some pictures -

This isn't the clearest of pictures, but this deer knows what's up.

We walked up to this temple where the tour guide had specifically Courtney, Grace, and I all pose behind some of the poles of the temple. I couldn't catch a complete reason why, but I guess this temple is catered more towards women. There were miko (Japanese priestesses) running the shops and some of the flowers of the trees were symbolic of fertility.

Here's me being all feminine in a feminine temple. He had us pose this way - it was actually pretty funny.

The temple itself

After walking through a few more temples and gift shops, we headed off to the main temple. This temple is the biggest wooden building in the world - Todaiji temple. Here is where you can find huge statues of buddha and other bodhisattva/gods. I actually didn't catch exactly who/what these statues represented. We also got to crawl through this hole in a pole (which I believe is supposed to be the buddhist's nose) to gain wisdom. Unfortunately, my memory card ran out and I wasn't able to take too many pictures. I did get some pictures on my video camera, but my shirt decided to show all of my bra off so I won't be showing those.