Ok! I finally got the pictures from a friend and after slimming down the 450+ pictures down to a manageable level I’ll start my first post after a 10 day hiatus by describing the ‘Deer Park’ at Nara!

After letting my host family know that I was going to be home much later that night (around 10pm vs. the normal 5-6pm), I trudged off to classes eagerly looking forward to going to Nara. Because Nara lies about an hour train ride away from Kyoto, we skipped out on 1.5 hours of classes in order to get to Nara with enough time to do everything that our director had slated for us. Upon our arrival, we were greeted by an almost constant chorus of ‘Hello!’s from eager, young Japanese school children greeting the foreigners. While riding the escalator out of the subway station, the shouts even echoed so much that it just became a buzzing of various syllables! Silly kids =P

Before I go any further I need to explain why we were going to Nara, and what exactly we were so excited to see there. Nara was the first actual capital of Japan from ~700-900AD, and along with Kyoto is considered to be the cultural seat of the country. Before the declaration from the Emperor following the defeat of the Japanese empire after WWII, deer were seen to be messengers of the Shinto Gods and were protected in Nara as divine messengers. After the declaration, because Shintoism was denounced as a state religion, the deer that inhabited Nara were instead made a national treasure making it illegal to hunt them at all. Instead of the deer in Utah or in various other parts in the US, the deer at Nara are docile and semi-domesticated. You can buy ‘deer crackers’ from vendors all over Nara to feed the literal throngs of deer there, and if you find a particularly bright young deer you can bow to them and they will bow back in exchange of a cracker! Instead of describing any more, I’ll instead put a little pictorial montage of our day in Nara =) 

The entire day we were seeing, feeding, petting, and hugging deer...until Anna (right) found out that she is very, very allergic to deer...something-or-other. After her eyes swelled shut, and her sinuses were absolutely killing her, we finally put 2 and 2 together and stopped playing with the cute deer =(

Anyways! Montage!