Nara

The day after I visited Kyoto, I went to another small town near Osaka, Nara. It only took 30 minutes from where Craig lives to get there. It has a number of interesting sites so it was good for a day trip. First there were a number of pagodas.

Past the pagodas, there is an entrance to a huge park that has a number of temples and shrines in it as well as about 3000 tame deer.
The deer were as high as my waist and they were used to people so it was easy to go and pet them. They were often looking for food and come up to you if you reach into your pocket. If you pull out a camera though, they just walk away and look for somebody else. Even though there are so many deer there, they are all spread out, so I usually only saw 5 maximum together, except when one old lady pulled up in her car and dumped buckets and buckets of food peelings for the deer. I think she does this regularly, since the once the deer saw her car, they started walking up to it.
It was strange visiting some of the temples when there were also deer there:
The biggest temple there is Todaiji temple, which is actually the largest wooden structure in the world.
Outside it, there was a wodden Buddhist deity. People can rub a part of the statue where they have pain and then rub the same part of their body and the pain is suppose to get better.
Inside the temple is the Great Buddha, which was very, very large:
Outside the temple there were some beautiful flags leading up the walk:
I also got a nice view of Nara when I took a walk up a hill near a temple:
On the way back through the park, I saw a woman selling sweet potatoes that she had roasted on her cart:
I bought one large sweet potato from her. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish it all, so I shared it with a doe and her 2 fawns. ^^