Everything's Bigger in Nara

I was a little worried about my friend after dinner on Wednesday night. Pretty soon after we got home it was obvious that she was ill, and she didn’t look any better on Thursday morning, and we were both fairly certain that she had gotten food poisoning at the Italian restaurant where we had dinner. It would have been better, I think, not to continue on to Nara that day, but for some reason my friend’s host mother disagreed. I don’t know if she thought that my friend was faking it, or overreacting or something, or if she was just embarrassed to have asked me all the way to her house just to send me home early, but we wound up getting in the car and driving to Nara, about an hour and a half away. Nara itself was beautiful as Ise with regards to fall colour, and if we had been disappointed with the scale of things on the previous day, we were more than impressed with our findings on the following one. The main two features of Nara that people will bring up are 1) deer and 2) Todaiji Buddhist temple. As for point 1, there are, in fact, a lot of deer, but they were not as aggressive as the deer at Miyajima, mainly (I believe) owing to the fact that tourists are allowed to feed the deer in Nara, and there are many stands that sell sembei (rice crackers) for that purpose. Basically, if the deer see that you don’t have any sembei, then they won’t bother you because they know that you have no food for them. Now on to the more interesting point 2. Todaiji temple has been in Nara for a very long time, though it has been destroyed by fire on more than one occasion. The current structure is actually about 33% smaller than its predecessor, but still manages to rank as the largest wooden structure in the world, and houses a massive statue of the Buddha (14.98 meters) seated on a lotus flower and flanked by two gold-plated Boddhisattvas. It is hard to give justice to just how awesome this place is, and pictures simply don’t do it justice, though I did my best. The temple also ranks as a UNESCO world heritage site (I wonder how many of these there are in Japan? Because I feel like I’ve been to quite a few). At the end of the day my friend looked a little better, though could still only bring herself to eat rice. They dropped me off at home with a massive box of persimmons and my own Omiyage of cakes shaped like camellia blossoms.
-I really love persimmons and persimmon trees, though I can’t remember having ever seen either before coming here. My favourite thing about the trees themselves is that long after the leaves have fallen off the fruit remains, which is really a lovely effect.
-Everything’s bigger in Nara.
-I’m really glad that I have the host family that I do, even if they don’t have central heating.
-Almost everything in Japan, it seems, has a history that goes something like ‘they built an incredible structure here a really long time ago, but then it burned down. They built another pretty darned cool one after that, but it burned down too, so this one’s not so nearly as old as it could be if we they’d had a sprinkler system installed.’