Dec
27
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s Nara
Filed Under Newspost
Prologue to Nara
Rough day. I ended up spending around 15 hours straight on the road on the 27th. Here’s how it happened. Without telling me, the guys had decided they were going to Nara today. Well I didn’t invite them to Japan just so they could do their thing and go around touring without me, so I had to join them. This meant waking up at 7 once again in order to get on the same train as the others. We arrived at the JR Nara station around 10 and decided to go eat some breakfast because we were all starving. After a few minutes of walking we found a nice old place owned by a lone old woman and she made some fairly simple meals for us. What explains that even if I order anything in Japanese and they originally accept the order and nod, the waiters and shop-owners everywhere always have to get my confirmation on the amount of meals by asking “wan?” in a broken English and pointing their index finger up as if I was some kind of fucking retard. Yes, ONE! I just told you that in Japanese, don’t switch to the only English word you know because if I retort you will run out of vocabulary pool.
Our new best friend
Everyone’s grudge
Nara is a city known for having deer all around the city. Don’t ask me why, I didn’t invite them. I think they built Nara or something. According to my sources, the deer are the second biggest group of foreigners in the city (little less than 1200), right after the Koreans who are around 1200. I’ll dedicate this paragraph to the deer so I can leave the topic in peace in the future. Although I won’t mention them again, believe me, they were present wherever we went. So back to the story: After the late breakfast we started walking the streets towards Nara park and quickly encountered the first of innumerable herds of deer we saw that day. We never bought the sembei they were supposed to be fed with, and instead just made them believe we had food by standing around taking pictures. The deer very much enjoyed sneaking up on people and pushing them to subtly inform them they were hungry. Most of them also started behaving more aggressively when other deer around them got sembeis and they didn’t.
Predators double-teaming on the unsuspecting shika-san
In all honesty, seeing other tourists get assaulted by deer made for much more entertainment than trying to feed one. At some point of the day, Tiina decided to buy one sweet potato from a street potato wagon thingamajig in what has since been declared a bad move. First of all, the potato cost 1000yen and nobody really enjoyed the taste. “Nobody” refers to us humans, because the deer were delighted to know we had something worth eating and after a few minutes Joona was mob training several deer around the park with the paper bag containing the sweet potato. A bit later, a crow, to which some of us referred to as a “not yet fully trained deer” tried to follow us by jumping to get his share of the food. Later on we even encountered one deer who was able to perform synchronized bowing with a Japanese kid to show him his gratitude. It was all very picturesque.
"My doctor's retarded. I don't have a brain tumor."
The Deer Whisperer performing an I.Q. test. Left hand is paper, right hand is potato peel.
The Turismus
Pretty much the whole of ancient Nara is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so there were lots to see. Too bad I was concentrating on not getting run over by overzealous deer most of the time, so the only things I can actually remember visiting were the Kasuga-taisha and the To-daiji. We never paid to go inside the Kasuga shrine, but even outside we were able to offer a few yen in donations, make wishes and take photographs of mildly humorous engrish signs scattered around the entrance. The actual highlight of the day was the To-daiji, which I would claim to be the single most important reason for anyone to go to Nara, ever, although I do not have any data to back up the claim. First of all, the temple itself is the biggest wooden building on the planet. Second, it houses a gargantuan statue of Vairocana Buddha, and third, sometimes the Buddha breaks free from his chains and goes on to terrorize the city like in the movies. Trust me on this one. So the temple was massive, it had beautiful old statues inside and all the rest of it. There is also a hole reported to be the same size as the Buddha’s nostril in one of the wooden pillars inside the temple. According to the legend, people who pass through it become enlightened. All of us did, and I’m not sure whether anyone achieved Nirvana but personally I felt a slight pain in my left shoulder after the squeeze-through.
Colossal buddha. Picture not to scale.
Maten är färdig
Next part was eating again. We went downtown back to the modern part of Nara to try one of the renowned pork cutlet restaurants there, and it was delicious indeed. By that point we were also getting really tired of the walking outdoors and were considering returning home to rest, but it was one of the best opportunities to go eat sushi together in Osaka so we opted for that instead. The sushi restaurant Visa had recommended to us was fully booked, so we had to wait until around 8 before beginning the fishfest. By that time, those blasphemers who had told me they “only wanted to eat a bit” or “didn’t really like sushi” did turncoat and realized that good sushi is actually good. Well everyone except Tommi, who still needs some more work.
Dinner on conveyer belt
A collection of photos from that fateful day. Taken by Lauri, Joona and me with absolutely no permission from them to upload the pics here. Order not chronological and everything is messed up. Enjoy.