03/24 Nara/Osaka

The day started with a trip to Nara, a city and hour from Osaka famousfor shrines and temples. I had to pick up some pocky to feed the deerand I was set to go. Once in Nara, we made our way to Nara Park, wherethe famous shrines are. Along the way we found a MOS burger, a Japanese burger joint, similiar to the one they show in Prince ofTennis all the time. I tried the spicy MOS burger which was prettygood and assembled nicely, unlike the squished stuff from Canadian fastfood places.

The first thing we say was the 5 story pagoda, a large tower. Aftersome pictures we emcountered the first of many deer "shika". Nara Shikamaru, of naruto fame makes a lot of sense now. I feed the deerpocky and leaves which was pretty cool, the deer are so friendly.After a while of playing with the deer we eventually made our way tokasuga shrine, a large Shinto shrine. We decided to not enter and justwalked around, taking pictures as we went.

After bumping into random shrines all over we got to the big one,todaiji temple. The temple is huge and is the largest wooden structurein the world. The original temple was 66% larger but it was destroyedby fire twice. Inside the temple is a varicana Buddha. The length ofthe head alone is 5 meters. It was very interesting and huge!!!

The other cool thing about Nara Park was the Sakuras were beginning to bloom, making the park very pretty. They ranged from white to various shades of pink. Hopefully by the time we get to Kyoto the sakuras around the temples will be in full bloom.

After leaving the shrines we had some takoyaki, and pasteries beforereturning back to Osaka.

In Osaka we first went to the area around the second downtown ( yesOsaka has 2 downtowns) and spent some time in yodobashi camera, alarge electronics store. I really want to buy an ultra mobile pc,maybe in Tokyo. I also saw the macbook air for the first time but Ilike the lenovo x300 more. Also, the cellphones they have here arecrazy unfortunately they don't work in Canada (especially on Rogers).

The next location was the Shin-Umeda City building's floating gardenobservatory. It was a platform suspended between 2 towers, 40 storiesin the air and had a 360 degree view of the city. Osaka looks amazingfrom there at night. After taking a bunch of pictures we headed outfor some food. We found some kushikatsu style food near our hotel,which is breaded and deep fried stuff. We randomly picked chicken,pork, sausage, meatballs, peppers, fish, scallop, mushroom, andcheese. It was good and cheap. We also picked some random street foodwhich was kelp, octopus, egg, and fish cakes stewing in soup.