JAPAN
Japan 2023 Day 17 - Nara / Kyoto
Today we tried out the hotel breakfast – it was pretty much indistinguishable from the breakfast in our hotel from Sapporo – in other words it was fine. The weirdest part was that the restaurant is in the basement, is themed visually as an Italian restaurant but is playing 50’s era American music and serving Japanese breakfast.
We had to get an early start to head out to Nara which is about an hour on public transit between the bus and the train. For the train you have to pay twice, once at the stile and again for a special seat ticket. You can either pay cash on the train (which we did) or pay for the ticket at a counter or ticketing machine.
All I knew about Nara before going was that there are deer there. A lot of deer you might say. There’s a big central park with a bunch of temples and shopping areas around it so it’s a great day trip destination from Kyoto. Here’s a guide or two to help you beyond my own experience.
Like the guides say, you don’t get far from the train station before running into deer. They’re mainly in the park but they’re free to wander the city as they please so you’ll see them on the sidewalk. There are vendors to sell you crackers to feed the deer. Whether you have food or not you can go right up to them and they’ll bow to you.
There’s also a buttload of shrines and pagodas and such to look at around here. It can be overwhelming and I don’t think we even noted down the names of everything we saw. Here’s a PDF map. We started at Kofuku-ji Temple and worked our way east and north to Todai-ji Temple. Along the way you’ll find art museums with buddhist statues, food stalls, MORE deer and nice scenery to behold.
Five story pagoda:
The Nara National Museum (we didn’t go inside and this is the view from the back oops)
While walking past the Okumura Commemorative Museum we think we saw some trees with blossoms! While it was tempting to think they were cherry blossoms at first, it’s way too early for cherries in February and more likely it would be plum blossoms:
On our way to Todai-ji Temple we were feeling a little peckish just in time to come across a street filled with vendors. The deer mingle with people here and they can sometimes be jerks about your food so just stay vigilant. We got some yakisoba (grilled noodles) here that was pretty decent and picked up a few souvenirs.
Todai-ji does cost extra but I think it’s worth it. According to the website it’s the largest wooden structure in the entire world. Additionally, it used to be even larger before it burned down… twice. Probably why people stopped making giant wooden structures!
The outer gate. Note the deer are still hanging out even here:
The completely jacked statues on the inside of the above pictured gate:
View of the outside of the courtyard. The pagoda roof you see on the right is where the statues are inside.
From the inside of the courtyard. The stone lantern you see in the bottom-middle is well over a thousand years old and is original to when they first constructed this temple.
I wish I had better phone pictures of the inside (I had my DSLR today and I won’t be able to look at photos until we get home). We were trying not to block the walkway so everything I have is either blurry or super crooked.
The realllly big statues inside the temple:
At this point we were full on starving hungry so we walked back out of the park and over to Okonomiyaki Parco. It was a little out of the way and looks unassuming but I really liked my shrimp and prawn dish.
Basically it’s a meat and vegetable fried omelette deal with sauce on top.
Also we got the homemade gyoza and it was a lot of our favorite part of the lunch. The chili oil was delicious.
Since we had a late lunch it was already well past 2 PM. There’s a LOT more to Nara Park than what we saw – there’s a whole hiking trail you can do and several other shrines to see. We didn’t really see the need ourselves and my boyfriend was interested in a tea tasting at a tea shop back in Kyoto. So we turned back here although we took a different route through a fun shopping mall.
Back in Kyoto we stopped by the tea shop Ippodo but it was 4 PM and already too late to do a tea tasting. We got ourselves a reservation for the next day though so stay tuned!
As a consolation prize we wanted to get boba. Justin found a place on Google maps called Mu Sha Cha Machi but it’s actually not where it says it is on Google, it’s in Rokkun Plaza in view of the Burger King. So we had to kinda sleuth the Google review images to actually find it. I got the mango milk tea and actually thought it was really good! Not too sweet even though I couldn’t customize the sweetness.
For dinner tonight we finally made it to Monsen Kiyamachi again at 9 PM. I actually don’t think I’ve had chicken ramen from a restaurant before. We both got a beer and the “tori chashu” ramen with tamago.
It’s like the highest quality chicken noodle soup I’ve ever had but also ramen noodles and the best tamago of my life. The chicken chashu was super tender. I can see why Justin likes this place so much!