Day 10 in Japan: Nara



This will have to be brief, not because the day in Nara was uninteresting but because I don't have a lot of blogging time today.

In the morning we visited the Taikichi Irie Nara City Museum of Photography, one of many beautiful buildings we encountered on our trip. The ground floor which is mostly open space with glass walls, is surrounded by a pool of water. The other floor, the gallery, is below ground, so from outside what one sees is virtually a roof floating above a reflecting pool. Taikichi Irie was a photographer whose vast life's work makes up the bulk of the museum's permanent collection. On display today were a number of his photographs of roads around Nara, many of them the approaches to shrines and temples. They were brilliantly, or should I say mistily, evocative of the countryside as we'd seen it. There was a second exhibition of photos by other people of the district's railway from the last hundred and fifty years. These had a certain historical interest, but I'm pretty much of the view that if you've seen one steam train you've seen them all, so those rooms had a limited appeal for me.

From that rarefied atmosphere we proceeded to the park, where it became clear why the shops in the main street and arcades of Nara have a sprinkling of shops selling silly antler hats -- the kind that bank tellers wear at Christmas in Sydney. The place is filled to the gills with deer (and not a hungry tiger in sight). There were quite a healthy number of human beings enjoying the last days of summer in the park as well. Not all of them got lost as we did as we wandered from shrine to shrine in the lower end of the park, past seemingly endless mossy lanterns, most of them with fresh paper walls (though there must be a better word for that part of a lantern).





After a quick stop for a noodle lunch, during which we played around with our phones, Penny taking a photo of me to have as her wallpaper, we made our big visit of the day, to the Todai-ji Temple, Nara's biggest wooden building in the world, which houses the biggest bronze sitting Buddha in the world, and a pillar with a hole in it that bestows something wonderful (long life, fertility, wealth?) on anyone who crawls through it. A very long queue of parents with small children waiting to perform that feat gave a festive feel to the temple.



And everywhere there were deer, cadging from the tourists and terrorising small children. At first I thought this terrorising was unintentional, since mostly the deer just stood there while the small children wrestled with their fears, hugging their shaved ice or kebabs a little closer to their chests and clinging to their parents' hands. But then I saw one of the verminous creatures lunge forward and try to bite a little boy in the eye. I don't think it managed to do any actual harm, but that was one small boy who was no longer tempted to think of deer as sweet, harmless creatures.



That night we watched the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on television, with Japanese commentary and very few glimpses of the Australian athletes, but it was fun anyhow. And this was the day we bought a couple of packs of cards and began playing Canasta. From here to the end of the trip, we played a game most nights, abut in order to save my self respect I won't tell you who won most games or by what margin.

Oh, and at some stage that night we realised that Penny's phone had disappeared. We'd probably left it at the place we had noodles for lunch. And that set the agenda for the next day ...

Posted: Wed - September 24, 2008 at 10:43 PM           |

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