Oh Deers

Spent most of yesterday frolicking with deer in Nara with Anne. Most everyone else is gone or about to leave. Mateusz, AJ, Emily – all gone. Woke at 7:30 today to see Abby off to the airport, but she had already left. I guess she forgot her passport on our trip to Okinawa. She'd rushed off to the embassy in Osaka before I woke up. I hope she makes her plane.

Anyway, Nara and deer. There were many of them (supposedly about 1,000 in the park), and they had the habit of prodding anyone holding food "gently" with their antlers.

Nara is an excellent tourist town by the way. Excessively nice to gaijin. Anne had no problem ordering vegetarian okonomiyaki – a request usually granted, but only after much brow-furrowing and hawwing. We also ducked into a conbini to grab some Takarazuka tickets. (Okay! TANGENT GO!! You can do anything in a conbini: pay bills, buy concert/museum/sports tickets, get most groceries, find a decent lunch. There's even a corner with pornographic manga. And sometimes they have video games, too. But anyway!) A Lawson Station employee willfully took 10 minutes of her time to grab us some tickets from a machine. Kanji's a bitch, and we couldn't decipher the damn thing. (This one time we bought bubble bath instead of lotion...) Also, three little childrens, aged five or thereabouts greeted us in the park with paperwork. They asked us questions in unison ("Can you skate!?") and checked the appropriate boxes on their forms. One wonders if the Japanese government has finally found a use for the post-toddler crowd.

I'm pretty much templed out. I know what pretty, red, pointy buildings with soft ,clean wooden floors and rock gardens are like, thank you very much. But Todai-ji is well worth visiting. It's the biggest wooden building in the world, and it has an enormous Buddha in it. Like, I am perhaps just a little bigger than one of its eyes. And Todaiji has two of these guys:


And they are just cool.

Blogging will be quite spotty (as if it isn't, anyway) after the fifth. The Anne and I are taking off for a trip to Kyushu for a week. We're pretty much going to own western Japan by the end of it. In the meanwhile, she's saving rent by crashing on my floor. I've rearranged my furniture to accomodate her. It's like major reality disruption. Not in any bad way, but it's definitely over. I'm going home in three weeks.