So I may have jumped the gun on my "I beat jet-lag" celebration. Last night I crashed at 9 PM and then woke up at like 3:30 in the morning. Today I almost fell asleep on the train at like 6, but drank some coffee with Tommy Lee Jones's silhouette on it and I'm determined to make it to 11 PM tonight.
Today I went to Nara, the imperial capital before Kyoto. Nara is awesome. I was honestly bored with a lot of the Kyoto temples yeterday (and none seemed that different from the others), but did not have the same problem in Nara. They have this thing called the Daibatsu, a giant buddha. In order to go near this thing, as you walk through the park you pass through a gate. As I was walking through the gate, I had a sense that something scary was watching me. I looked to my right, and there was a 30-foot high (at least) guard that looked really lifelike and really angry and were made out of wood. Lonely Planet had said these (there was also one on the left) were perhaps the finest example of wood-carving in the world, which upon reading I thought would be the sculptural equivalent of being the best JV team in the world, but these things were awesome. I thought they could not be topped. They were topped by the Big Buddha.
This thing is like 50 meters high or something ridiculous like that. He's huge. It's one of those things that, by its sheer size, force you to contemplate the planning, work, and emotion that must have gone into its creation. He's supposed to represent the original Buddha before all the temporal Buddhas, and again, really big. He has some more giant guards in the temple that houses him. I was quite impressed, and spent I don't know how long, but probably close to half an hour just looking at him. Good stuff.
Oh, the other main thing about Nara is that there are deer everywhere, all over the park. The first deer I saw was outside of a shop, just hanging out by the door, like I would if I got to a store early and was waiting for it to open. Weird, and cute. Deer are an adorable-looking animal. By the end of the afternoon, I would hate them.
A thing you're supposed to do is buy some food and feed the deer. I had never hand-fed deer before, and thought that would be cool. The problem is that the deer know you're supposed to do it, and they get fed like that all the time, so they're real, real spoiled about the whole thing. A video clip I had some Japanese people take of me has me hand-feeding a group of deer, which looks adorable. The clip cuts off before the deer get a little out of hand as my stack of snacks gets short on supply. They really went for it, and one of them even gave me a gentle but firm head-butt. Really out of line. These lazy, obnoxious deer just follow people everywhere (especially if you have already fed them), bother them, don't do much else, and are annoying. When I was just chilling out on a bench later on in the afternoon, one got right up in my grill, and got really close to my camera, which I moved out of its way, my bag with my books in it, which I moved out of its way, and then it just started nibbling on the notebook I was writing in, like a total asshole. I had to get up and move. 2 life lessons I learned from these stupid, lazy, annoying animals:
1. If you constantly reward something just for being cute, that's all it will ever be capable of.
2. If you feed something for doing nothing and staying in one place, that's all it will ever do.
Deep? Maybe not. But those deer were annoying.
So what else was there? Oh, a thing I saw before I even got to the park, and made me speed up my activities for the day: Sega World. A really loud, flashing-light-y, video game arcade. They had an arcade version of Super Mario World. They had awesome games, like this Rambo shoot-em-up. They had silly games. At the end of the day, I knew I would come back, and I did. In the morning it was empty, but in the afternoon, packed with kids. And me. Here are the 2 highlights:
1. You know the arcade game called "1945," where you're a fighter airplane and you have to shoot down all these other planes and ships? I played it in Japan. Did I mention the game is called "1945," and you shoot down planes and ships? It was in English, so I'm pretty sure I was on the Allied side, but there's no way of knowing for sure.
2. There was this game in the Dance Dance Revolution mold, except instead of dancing on a foot-pad you bang a drum to a beat. I watched other people play it, and watched as they skipped right past the Mario theme. This was literally the only song on their whole playlist I could recognize because I'm not familiar with J-pop. Obviously, I had to play the game just to play that level. I did, and it was great. Really good stuff. It made me happy. They also had posters of Sonic characters saying slogans that sound silly in English. Hopefully my photos of them came out well.
They have a lot of Pachinko parlors here in Japan. It's really depressing. I stepped in one to see what it was like, and it sounded like I was right behind a jumbo jet engine, or, alternately, like death. Also, the standard slot machine noises. I don't know why people play that crap. They just put in money, and then watch these little pinballs fall into slots in a pattern they have no control over. You don't DO anything, and you have to know that if you play that thing a lot, you're going to lose money in the long-term, period. Sadness.
Also, I finally found some warped versions of American culture. One restaurant pub had a kind of drawn portrait of an African American, and enticed you into the pub with the promise of "Black music and bourbon." There was also like an America Lifestyle store, which featured in their window display a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker and a "Jesus Saves" bumper sticker. They pretty much have our number. Their hip-hop dress store was also kind of funny, especially the trendy hat that just said "FUCKERS" on it.
A lot of the couples I see in these touristy places I'm going are white-guy-Asian (presumably Japanese)-girl, with occasionally the reverse. No follow-up here, just saying.
Sorry this is so scattered, my brain is kind of bad right now from a weird sleep cycle and not really having conversations in English. OK, let's see if I can actually make it out tonight. Yeah!
