Nara Deer

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There’s a place in Japan called Nara.  It’s kind of a city, but not really.  It’s famous for this enormous temple that they have there (a few of you will get postcards with a picture of it soon).  It’s the largest wooden temple/structure in the entire world, as far as we know.  It’s roughly 170 feet high, which is like a 17 story building made entirely from wood.  The weird part is that it used to be bigger – the one built in the 8^th century was a good bit larger – but it’s been burnt down twice and it got smaller when it was rebuilt in the 18^th century.  It’s really a very impressive sight to see.

 

Inside it there’s an enormous wooden Buddha, which I think is the single largest wood-carving in the world, and also the largest statue of the Buddha in the world.  I don’t know if this is the original or not, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s crazy that they could do it in the 18^th century anyway.  I hardly even know how they would construct it now.

 

There’s also a pillar inside with a hole in the bottom.  I guess the pillar is something like three to four feet in diameter.  The hole goes horizontally and is pretty much a rectangular prism cut out of the bottom of the pillar, that’s maybe eighteen inches wide and eighteen inches high.  The legend is that if you can pull yourself through the hole, you can go to paradise.  I don’t know if it’s meant as a shot at overindulgence or what, but that’s the legend.  The tour guide encouraged me to do it.  I considered not doing it.  Then I wondered if I was really above stripping off my jackets and getting down on my hands and knees and crawling in public.  Maybe that’s the point of the whole thing.  So I did it, and I almost got stuck, but I figured out the One Arm At A Time thing and pulled myself through eventually.  It was pretty awesome.

 

Another supersweet thing about Nara is the deer.  They’re LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.  This is how ubiquitous they are.  Imagine the room you’re sitting in.  Now place a deer right next to your chair.

 

That’s what it’s like to walk through Nara.

 

They’re friendly though.  You can pet them.  If you bow your head to them, they’ll bow to you as well.  There are signs saying not to anger them, or something, but the pictures have deer with angry faces and red lightning shooting out of their heads.  We all joked about the Nara deer shooting red lightning out of their heads.  It didn’t happen, and we were kinda sad.

 

A Japanese girl bought some food to give to the deer.  She was young, maybe 8 years old or so.  She definitely wasn’t ready for the deer to be nibbling inside her pockets and at her fingers and hands, and she tried to run away from the deer, but she wasn’t quick enough to get away from them.  She held her hands up high, but it wasn’t high enough, and they still nibbled on it.  She started to cry.  I laughed because it was adorable, but then I felt bad, being the jerk foreigner who laughed at the local’s misery.  But seriously it was adorable.  The deer wouldn’t hurt a fly, not even with the red lightning.