Nara with Ryan, Midori, Chiaki

The next day Jamie had to go to work but Ryan, Midori and I went to Nara for the day. Ryan wanted to see something neat. We were also going to meet Midori's friend Chiaki.

Chiaki lives in Shiga, which is outside of Kyoto and they met in Canada while on exchange. Chiaki is still in uni so she had the day off as well.

We all arrived at the Nara Kintetsu station and as a group we went to Starbucks for breakfast and coffee. Midori used her employee discount and saved us some money. Then we made our way up the hill towards Nara Park and Todaiji temple.

I'm pretty sure I've blogged about Todaiji before so I'll let Wikipedia say it all. One cool thing to do inside the temple is to pass your way through a hole that is about the size of the huge Buddha's nose. Some of our Japanese friends have told us it gives you one year of good health while Wikipedia says it gives you enlightenment in your next life.

I used my salve flash and got some decent pictures of the Gods of heaven. Usually they are hard to capture because of their size and the relative darkness of the temple. The extra illumination really helped out.

After Todaji we roamed Nara Park. The grounds around Todaiji had some great places for some scenic shots. There were two ponds, a bridge, a couple of waterfalls, and a river. I took some classic photos of the group posing in these places. I think the river shots were the best. I had Ryan and Chiaki walk over to the other side and we did some reaching over the river shots.

It was interesting to see Midori's enthusiasm for nature as we walked about. She had this great ability to see neat things around us. She seemed to find mushrooms everywhere. She pet the deer, showing no signs of fear. She even stopped to harass some ants.

After the photo shoot we went over to Kasuga Taisha. The thousand lanterns leading the way through Nara Park were really cool. One even had a symbol that closely resembled the Sogo logo. Sogo is a department store chain and we joked about that. The symbol pre-dates the department store by centuries.

Here we saw Midori's love for nature come through. She spotted a 蝉 (semi) or cicada for us English speakers. It had lost its way so she picked it up and transported it to a safer location.

We decided to go the the JR station to head back to Osaka to see the Umeda Sky Tower. But before we left we saw a statue of Colonel Saunders in a Yukata so we got pictures with him.

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