JAPAN DIARY: NARA

Day one and two of my trip in Japan have sadly come and gone… But, there’s still so much more to come!! I woke up for my third day of exploring in this country today with the plan to go visit Nara! As we were still staying at a hotel near the Universal Studios (that I talked about here), we had to take a one-hour long train ride to get to Nara. This trip luckily went by very quickly as my dad and I spent it organizing what we would be doing for the next couple of days! Amongst our plans may or may not be something including kangaroos… find out more by staying up to date on zimmylifestyle.com posts!!

Then, when we arrived in the center of Nara, we took a taxi to it’s famed temple. At the entrance of the temple we were strangely met by a herd of deer! This was evidently surprising to me as I didn’t know there were deer in Japan! After taking photos of this surprising encounter, we walked up a path that lead us to the big temple. Upon arrival we were asked to rinse our hands with water and after that we threw a few coins into a box to burn an incense in the temple!

My father and I then entered the temple itself where we saw a beautiful giant Buddha statue surrounded by candles. Eyeing the architecture and admiring the other statues, I thoroughly enjoyed myself! Overall it was an amazing and very cultural experience!

Once we had left the temple, we directly came across a lady selling Japanese charms which would make great souvenirs! Each charm had it’s own significant and individual meaning so I bought two of them for luck! After this we visited a couple more temples, met a couple more deer and then finally stopped at a cafe to rehydrate on apple juice! Along the paths we were walking on were several deer cookie stands to help tourists involve themselves in the environment… Me being a tourist I bought a box filled with ten food treats, meaning that a trail of deer would be following me as long as the box was open! To avoid them licking my shirt and practically chasing me, I ended up handing them out fairly quickly!!

Looking back at it now, my trip to Nara was honestly amazing! Nara is stunning and is definitely the most beautiful place I’ve been to in Japan so far!

Love,

Tiffany Lea

Comment below any stories you have about deer encounters and if you like kangaroos or not!