(12/21) Nara: Deer and Big Buddha

On the last day of our Honshu trip, Wednesday the 21st, we went to Nara. We went by bus to our first stop, Todaiji, a really big temple with a giant statue of the Buddha Vairocana in it (there's more than one Buddha nowadays). But outside the temple we saw the other thing that Nara is famous for: wild deer.


And there were a lot of deer all over the place, not just at that temple either. You could also buy little crackers to feed the deer and if you held them up in the air in front of them, they'd give you a polite bow as if asking for the biscuit. On the other hand, they weren't really that polite because they tended to surround you and butt you in the butt if you weren't paying attention to them.


After feeding the deer, we made our way into the temple and saw the main giant building which housed the giant Buddha statue.

There were also a few other statues if you walked around the statue and models of what the temple looked like before, since it had burned down twice in its history. There was also a small hole that was the size of the Buddha statue's nostril and if you were able to crawl through it, you got good luck or something.


Our other stop for the day was Kasuga Grand Shrine which was very close and also had wild deer roaming around. It was more of a normal shrine except that it had a buttload of stone lanterns leading up to it, making the already pretty area even nicer looking.


We grabbed a bite to eat near the shrine and then went back to the bus to be driven back to the airport and fly back home to Sapporo for our last couple days before returning to America.