Nara

This year marks the 1300 year of Nara. It was founded in 710 as the first capital of Japan. It only had this distinction for less than a century, but it still holds tons of important cultural treasures. The most significant of those is the Giant Buddha. It truly is a sight to see. The statue is huge. It is one of the largest statues of Buddha in Japan. This was the second time for me to see it, but it was still awesome.

Another major draw to Nara is the deer park. Hundreds of deer wander about the parks looking for people giving out deer crackers. These deer can get pretty aggressive and won't hesitate to snatch anything they can. I saw one deer grab some leaves from an old man's bag. It was pretty amusing. You can buy a stack of deer crackers for about 100 yen. It's worth to do once, but if you have small kids it's probably better not to.

The only bad thing about this trip is that my camera bugged out. It actually started freaking out the previous day. The pictures would come out all distorted and oddly colorful. I thought that it was overheating, but found that if I squeeze it it goes back to normal. I have no idea what's wrong with it. I just know that it picked a horrible time to finally die on me. I guess I'm lucky that it has lasted as long as it has. I bought this thing in preparation for my trip to Guam back in 2006. It has been a good and loyal piece of equipment, but now it's retirement time.

One interesting thing about this was that it was one of the very few times that I rode in a private car on a Japanese highway. My girlfriend drove and I navigated and admired the scenery. It was overall a nice drive. Had I been driving we would've stopped several times for picture breaks. Through most of the cities there were high walls which prevented some views, but outside the urban areas you could see mountains covered in trees and valleys and far off cities. It was neat. I definitely want to do this again.

Nara is just absolutely gorgeous. I really wish that my camera hadn't messed up on me. I won't have to opportunity to go back there for a long time. But when I do, I'm going to have a new and awesome camera to capture the beauty of this great city.

China day 3

This day was again an early one and again I stuffed myself at breakfast. This day was promising to be another full day of sight seeing and fun. However, today, most of Beijing was resting under a nice blanket of snow. It proved to be a very cold yet great day.

Our first stop was to Tiananmen Square. I was actually expecting something a bit different from all the pictures I've seen, but it was still great. We were told by our tour guide that there were many undercover police officers in the area so we should be careful not to say or do anything stupid. We all paused and took the obligatory photos and such. I marveled at sheer openness of the place. It truly is huge. I was a bit disappointed that we weren't going to Chairman Mao's mausoleum, but I guess we already had tons on our plate.

After about 20 minutes or so of photo taking and slowly freezing we headed into the Forbidden City. On our way from the square to the city itself we passed by army personnel doing drills with brooms. It was pretty interesting and I felt a bit bad for them.

So we enter the city and boy was it huge. I have truthfully never been in a building that large before. I've been to castles, both European and Japanese. I've been to huge cathedrals and temples, but never have I been somewhere like this. This place was expansive. We spent most of the day there. I think we were there for just about 4 hours. After a while I was getting tired of the constant march and the seemingly same scenery. We did see some interesting things though. There were several beautiful gardens and walkways and other places, but I was pretty cold and just wanted to get warm again.

Something that I enjoyed the most was getting to go to the traditional wall scroll workshop. There were a lot of neat pictures and I really wish I had the money to buy one, but alas I didn't. If I ever go back there I'm definitely going to make sure that I have the money to get one. That was the only thing that I saw while there that I really wanted.

Actually I'll take a little time now to make a little gripe. Because we were on a tour we were taken to several areas to buy souvenirs. I like getting something from my travels, but this time it was all ritzy crap that I didn't care about. I never saw anything that said China to me. We were taken places that would appeal to Japanese, which was fine as we were on a Japanese tour, but it seemed like the same mass produced junk that I could buy just about anywhere. I was just a bit disappointed that there weren't more items that had a more traditional feel to them.

After the long, cold and tiring trek through the city we finally emerged on the other side and quickly headed to a nearby park. This was pretty cool as there was a huge hill from which you could get a great view of the Forbidden City. I took some pictures and headed to the rendezvous point. I was by this time tired and pretty hungry and just wanted to get some food in my belly and to sit down for a bit.

This lunch was to be yamcha style food. I wasn't quite sure what it was and actually I still don't know why it was so special, but I wasn't impressed. I ate my fill and was happy, but the taste just wasn't as good as the other places had been.

Once lunch was done we shot over to The Temple of Heaven. It was nice and very picturesque but we were there too long. I got bored quickly and wanted to see other places. Sadly, we were done for the day. Dinner was next on our agenda and then rest time.

Dinner was another disappointment. It was Shanghai style and was sweet. I dislike sweet foods. I also felt that the stuff was all pre-made junk. I ate and was happy, but I felt a bit cheated.

Once back at the hotel Aaron and I decided to go on a little adventure. I had seen a McDonald's a little ways from our hotel and since we were both unsatisfied with the dinner we had, we decided to pop on over. The walk was less scary than the night before, but we had to walk through a tunnel and I was a bit apprehensive about that. I come from a big, pretty dangerous city and tunnels are not fun there. So when I saw the volunteer cops I felt better. We got to McDonald's and that's when we realized that we don't know any Chinese outside of greetings and other simple phrases. We basically ordered by smiling, pointing and nodding. We both got Big Mac meals with Diet Coke. It was good. It was basically the same as Japanese McDonald's and thus better than what you get back home.

We crashed at our hotel and just watched movies till sleep called our names.