Side trip to Nara

A typhoon swept through Japan over the weekend, which had the effect of blowing away a lot of the cherry blossoms. I went back to a spot that I took a picture from before the typhoon and tried to capture the "after".

Before

After

Lucky I caught the cherry blossoms when I did!

Today I got the chance to do a side trip to Nara, which is an hour train ride outside of Kyoto. There's a wonderful park there, filled with very old wooden temples, a huge (also very old) wooden buddha, and deer. Lots and lots of deer. More on that in a bit.

Pagoda at Kofukuji Temple

I was a little surprised at how big Nara Park is: it turns out it covers 1,300 acres. Obviously, I only saw a small slice of it, but it was beautiful once you got away from the cars. The highlight of the park is the Todaiji Temple, which contains Japan's largest bronze Buddha statue. To hold it, they then built the word's largest wooden structure, the Todaiji Temple. 

Todaiji Temple

Buddha. I think this picture doesn't do it justice - it was huge!

 The other cool thing about Nara Park is that there are a ton of deer that allowed to roam freely throughout the grounds, as they are considered divine messengers of some sort. They're really tame and friendly. Some might say too friendly, as I was warned by a kindly shop owner to zip up my purse so the deer don't nose their way into it. You can buy "deer cookies" for 150 yen (about $1.50) to feed them, and they'll come right up to take them out of your hand. Some of them got a little aggressive about it, bumping into you to try and make you drop your pile of cookies.

Nara still had cherry blossoms! The deer seem to be enjoying the view.

Greedy deer wolfing down his cookie

I enjoyed Nara, but after walking 0.001% of the park for 4 hours, my feet hurt and I hightailed it back to Kyoto. I realized that for all my talk in my earlier post, there was a pretty big tourist spot that I missed seeing last time: Nijo castle. Eager to correct that oversight, I made my way back to it in time to catch it before they closed for the evening.

It was very cool, full of beautiful tatami rooms and painted paper/wood panel sliding doors. Unfortunately, they didn't allow photography so you'll have to take my word for it!

They make you take your shoes off and store them on these shelves before going in.

 In the castle gardens, I caught these two gardeners on ladders up in one of the pine trees. It's hard to see in the photo, but they were basically brushing the loose pine needles off of the tree with little hand brooms. So that's how their gardens look so nice all of the time!

It's been a good trip, but I'm looking forward to getting on the plane to go home tomorrow!

Sakura season in Kyoto

It's an interesting experience visiting a foreign city for the second time. The pressure is off to hit up all of the major tourist spots. Without the need to see the "top five greatest temples in Kyoto" or whatnot, my sightseeing goals were much simpler: see cherry blossoms!

And see cherry blossoms I did! I was lucky in that my conference landed in the beginning of April, traditionally the optimal time to see cherry blossoms (sakura) in Kyoto. I was unlucky in that this was their earliest cherry blossom season on record. Cherry blossoms have a notoriously short shelf life, so by the time I landed it was clear they were already on the downslope of their bloom - some trees were bare from the blossoms having already come and gone. Regardless, there were still a lot of trees with plenty of blossoms still on their branches. Below is just a small selection of the many, many, many pictures I took of the flowers. They were just so beautiful and ethereal!

I also some cool wildlife walking around, like this bird outside one of the temples. I thought it was a carved statue, until it turned and blinked at me.

This was the garden of the Kyoto international conference center, where I've been spending 12+ hour days. Luckily it's quite a beautiful backdrop, with the koi ponds in the foreground and the cherry blossoms and hills as backdrop. On the left by the water you can see a crane that was flying back and forth over the ponds.

One food-related note: the food is much much weirder than I remember from last time. Maybe it's because I'm eating "fancier" hotel and conference food this time, instead of scraping by as a poor graduate student, or maybe I'm getting more crotchety in my old age. Either way, it's been difficult to get a solid meal during my time here. Whether it's salad and potato salad with my breakfast plate (see below), or shrimp and squid lurking in the spaghetti at the buffet lunch, it's been a bit touch and go. Thank goodness for 24-hour 7-elevens and their endless supply of cheap and tasty konbu onigiri. Now that's the food I remember eating in Kyoto on my last trip!