Nara - Deer Park

After lunch in Nara, we went for a walk in The Deer Park, where to our surprise, all the deer are tame. You can even buy deer crackers to feed the deer from local stalls dotted around the park. We decided we wouldn't feed the deer, after watching them chase numerous people around the park, who had the crackers.
Shivani kept saying: "That ones like Bambi, take a photo!" So we have lots of photos, but here is just a small collection.
Andrew enjoyed doing his Dr Dolittle bit with the deer, as you can see from the photo.
Photos of deer this close up are hard to get back home and we reckon David Attenborough would be impressed.

Nara - Food

We then bid farewell to Kyoto and our hotel, which we were genuinely sad to leave. Everyone in the hotel had been so nice and helpful and they even presented us with a photo in a frame as we checked out, of us two together one evening in the hotel lounge.
We caught the Train to Nara, dropped off our bags at the ryokan we would be staying in, then went and had lunch. We'll explain about the ryokan later, but 1st lunch. As you can see from the photos, it was very different to back home. Andrew ordered a Kaiseki lunch set, which basically is lots of small dishes of varies specialities and the food keeps coming! All of it involves fish, prawns or pork, with sides of pickles, vegetables, rice, noodles and miso soup. Doesn't the prawn in a jelly marble look just yummy?!
All of this is served in a traditional Japanese restuarant, where you sit on a cushion on the floor at a low level table overlooking a beautiful zen garden.

Rickshaw Ride

This guy is the poor soul, that carried us in his Rickshaw around one of the Kyoto districts. It was 33+ degrees celcius and he was sweating like mad, but was an excellent our guide for our 1/2 hour ride.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Shivani!

The 1st photo is of Shivaani outside a shop. Yes this is what shops look like in old Kyoto!

The middle 2 photos are of a bamboo forest, similar to ones seen in the films "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "House of Daggers".
The last photo is of Buddha stones outside a Temple. Each stone represents a Buddhist monk, who was inturned here over the ages. Once a year the existing monks come and light a candle for each stone, but unfortunately, that is not until the end of August.

Geisha Hunting in Gion

We have created a new sport!
It's called Geisha hunting and this is how it works:
You stand on a street corner near to where Geishas are rumoured to be spotted, moving between appointments and you wait with camera in hand and more importantly, switched on.
If you're lucky, you spot a Geisha and then you follow them, taking as many photos as possible.
The one we got was actually a Meiko, which is a Geisha in training, you can tell this from the shoes she is wearing - not the very high ones a full Geisha must wear. Even so, she was pretty impressive to spot and extremely rare.

Tea Ceremony

1st up is a photo Andrew took of kimono wearing ladys taking a photo of each other - sneaky, sneaky!
We attended a tea ceremony in Gion, one of the most traditional districts in all Kyoto. We've never seen such a kerfuffle to make a cuppa!
It was quite amazing to see the level of detail that is involved in this graceful ceremony. Everything from the direction the cup is facing and which hand you lift the cup with is vitally important. The tea itself is powdered tea call "matcha", a type of green tea, which we were not so keen on.

Inside a Temple

Okay! Enough Temple shots already!!!
Yes, but have you seen inside a Temple?
No, but we promise no more Temple shots unless they're really special from now on.