Nara (Day 3) - Shunie (Fire & Water Festival) & temples

It's always hard to wake up in the morning for me. Even though I spent months planning for this trip, setting myself 8am starts, doing a different activity every hour and even planning where to eat, nothing really turned out the way I wanted them to. Oh, I know what went wrong. I didn't plan for the awesome TV programs late at night! Staying up with Yuye nearly every night to watch the hilarious celebrity talk shows and mouth-watering travel/food shows really kept us from eating breakfast. That is why on the most part you won't be able to read about our breakfast adventures (apart from the ones in ryokans where we HAD to wake up since we paid for them already). One good thing came out of this though, Yuye can finally identify some members of SMAP since they were on TV every second night and even during ad breaks (they were ambassadors for the Japan earthquake appeals). I reckon the cleaning ladies really hated us because on a few occasions we had calls from reception telling us to basically either call off cleaning for the day or get out of the room.

Brunch and snacks

On day 3 of our trip (14 March) we woke up just in time for brunch in Namba Walk before paying Nara a second visit. Namba Walk links the three different Namba train stations into one long walkway (JR Namba Station, Kintetsu Namba Station and Nankai Namba Station all owned by different companies). This walkway houses many fashion and food stores which makes the long walk a bit more interesting. It didn't help much when JR Namba Station was the furthest away from our hotel though.

The place we chose to have brunch was called Sarashina Hirotaya (さらしな廣田屋) close to the entrance of Kintetsu Namba Station. Really we could have eaten anywhere. The food moulds that lined each and every restaurant window is enough to make a hungry me want to taste every one of those stores. Seriously. The moulds looked exactly the same as the real thing! I was so tempted to bring some back with me just to fool my friends. In the end the mould with a set of eel rice and soba won me over. These sets were reasonably good value. For less than $10 AUD, I got a smallish rice with eel on top and a huge bowl of soba with a tempura prawn. I wasn't able to finish mine so Yuye cleaned my bowls for me.

Yuye got a set of zaru soba (cold soba dipped in soy sauce) with tempura, also for less than $10. I personally liked his more but that's just because I didn't get to eat very much of it (Yuye was stingy!). I can eat that soba all day. :)

After brunch, we travelled straight to Nara. On the way to Nara Park, we passed a dango store called Douya (堂屋）and decided to snack on some freshly made dango. I must admit, dango's not my favourite snack since often it lacks flavour and it's really sticky (made of sticky rice) but a lot of people like it, guess it's personal preference.

Just before we got to the festival location, we got hungry again (not surprising right?) and got a leaf wrapped sushi along the path up to the temple. It was actually quite delicious, although the salmon didn't taste fresh. It was most likely preserved of some sort as it wasn't kept in a refrigerated area.

Nara's Deer

Most of our time in Nara was spent at Nara Park visiting the various shrines and temples, patting and feeding deer (and having our clothes chewed by them) and of course, attending the fire and water festival. The deer is literally everywhere! Be very careful if you plan on feeding them with deer senbei (rice crackers) because they will chase and headbutt you down and then chew every bit of your clothes until they get all the cracker crumbs off you. Each lot of senbei costs 150Yen and (yes we tasted it…) it really tasted like nothing, well, except plain rice crackers I suppose. Yuye and I were both overwhelmed by our popularity that running away was our only option of survival. Remember if you buy one, try not to open the package in front of the deer, the crackers will disappear in seconds.