Deer?

The weekend of the 22nd Aaron and I headed down to Nara. We were super psyched about the important cultural heritage sites.... ok, really, it was all about the tame deer. As anyone who's spent 5 minutes around me knows, I have an animal problem. You'd think I was 6 years old, "Whoa! Look at the kitty! Who's a pretty kitty, huh? Yeah, you are!" This is not restricted to the normal cute and fuzzy things. So when I heard about the 1000 tame deer wandering around, I was already plotting on how to steal one.

Well, the deer are tame. And freakily domesticated. They will run you down to steal your deer cookies and paper products. And they don't like to be touched. And spring is the season to lose the winter fur, so the chubby little deers all looked like they had the mange. It was hilarious!

As mentioned earlier, Nara is home to several of Japan's National Treasures. Accordingly, there were tons of tourists and school tours all dodging in and out of rampaging deer. Watching toddlers gleefully approach the deer only to run away screaming 15 seconds later is also hilarious.

Sadly, we only made it to a few of the sights. We hit the Big Buddha-- largest bronze Buddha inza whole world! It's very impressive. Definately worth seeing. I also really liked the wooden figures housed behind the Buddha. Oh, right... Ahem, soooo, back in the day, the imperial city was moved after the death of an Emperor. This practice was stopped after they settled in Kyoto [I guess they all just loved it there or something]. Nara was one of the earlier stops, which is why there are so many temples, shrines, statues, etc. The deer are considered to be messengers of the gods, but nowadays they're too busy terrorizing toddlers to pass anything along.