Today we left Kobe for Kyoto. We slept in a little (much needed) and made our way to the station by about 10 A.M., stopping at McDonalds so that Charles could try the McHotDog for breakfast. We had to change trains, which is a bit of an obstacle with luggage, but made it to Kyoto, where we located our hotel and dropped off our luggage before returning to the station to head to Fushimi-Inari.

In Fushimi-Inari, we checked out the 1,000 torii’s and various shrines (okay, so maybe we didn’t check out ALL 1000 torii’s… It was very cold and when you’ve seen one torii, you’ve seen them all). It didn’t take us long to decide it was time to head to Nara.

When we got to Nara, we headed for Nara Park. Nara Park is home to many tame deer. I, being the adventurous sort, purchased some “deer cookies” to feed the deer. I had been warned that the deer can be aggressive and should have guessed what I was in for whenever the deer saw me walk to the “deer cookie” stand and instantly mobbed me before I even had cookies in my possession. Before long, there were 6-7 deer surrounding me, all of them inching closer and closer as I tried to make sure each deer received equal ration. Apparently, I wasn’t doing an adequate job of fairly distributing the cookies, because a couple of them nipped at my tushie, which was very alarming, indeed.

Once the cookies were gone (good riddance!), we checked out the treasure hall, which was not as interesting as you would think. It was indoors and very warm, so that was 1,200 yen well spent. After warming up, we went to Todai-ji temple to see the giant Buddha. The giant Buddha was just as we expected (giant), if maybe a little more giant than we anticipated (5-6 monks easily could have fit in his up-turned palm). We took several pictures of the temple and the giant Buddha, as well as the deer, which are much less agressive when you are not feeding them.

As we were exiting the temple, Charles lingered behind to take some last-minute pictures of the giant Buddha, while I stepped outside where it was less crowded. As I stood there, three Japanese girls in their school uniforms ran up the stairs, excitedly pleading “Excuse meeee?!” Once I gave them my attention, one of them asked me “May we speak Engrish with you?” I told them that I would be happy to talk to them and asked them, “How are you?” They were obviously very excited and told me what their names were. Charles joined me, so I told them our names. They continued to read us questions from their “cheat sheet” and were very excited when we agreed to give them our address so that they could write to us and promised to write them back. After several pictures, they told us “Thank you very much” and wished us a happy trip. They ran down the stairs, pumping their fists in the air, obviously excited to have completed what must have been their fieldtrip assignment so easily. Charles and I, apparently, are rock stars in Japan.

After leaving the temple, we returned to Kyoto to check into the hotel. This hotel provides Japanese-style rooms, so we will be sleeping on mats rather than beds. Unfortunately, the mats are not made up for you, so we had to guess as to how they should be set up. We decided to have dinner in Gion, which is a shopping district in Kyoto. Gion was very beautiful, but most of the restaurants seemed a little more expensive than what we had anticipated spending. Instead, we found a more moderately priced restaurant (or food-serving closet, rather) outside of the central Gion neighborhood where we ate dinner (and drank sake!) before heading back to our hotel for the night.