Ok, so this weekend was crazy amazing! We left to catch an overnight bus to Nara (and some of the group Kyoto) on Friday night. We left at eight so that we could get to the Shinagawa station in Tokyo by ten forty. Of course it doesn't take near that long to get there, but we wanted to make extra sure that we had time to check in and find out where we were going. We ended up finding it no problem which was really nice so we didn ' t have to stress about anything and we could just sit and relax and stand around for a little while before we had to leave. Finally when the bus got there we got all our stuff and got settled in our seats. There wasn't much leg room, but I don't mind much since it was about the same size as the busses we would take to Mexico for missions' trips every year. I just put my headphones in on my ipod, put my sweatshirt hood over my head and put my knees on the seat close in front of me and passed out. I didn't even realize we stopped during the night at all for like reststops because I slept straight through til morning. So did Julie which was handy since we sat together and no one had to wake us up to get out or anything. In the morning I finally woke up around six something when Karly and Tanner got dropped off at Kyoto. We didn't get to Nara until Eight something, which wasn't bad. It was kind of perfect since Osaka was where both groups were meeting that night and it was in the middle of both Nara and Kyoto. When we got let off of the bus we were near the Prefecture Government building or something which was right next to the park . The nice thing about Nara, where we were this weekend, and Nikko, where Randi and I went last weekend, is that everything that is worth seeing is all located in one park, and so it isn't hard to find or get to . Holla. The first thing we did was find a building where we could change and stuff. This one office like building we found wasn't technically open yet but we were able to find a bathroom and turn the lights on and use it. At least no one else was there so we had free reign of the bathroom. We just changed, refreshed a little, and put sunscreen on so we could not fry like on Fuji last weekend. It was so incredibly hot. So glad I finally have my sweat towel cleaned from Fuji so I could use it, although now it is just crazy nasty again from this weekend so I will have to wash it again. Oh my gosh, my backpack was way too heavy. I thought I only packed the essentials, but it all added up way too much. I'm definitely going to pack way way smarter when I go to Hiroshima and Kyoto on the seventh and eighth. I am thinking that I am going to try and go to Kobe for a little while too . That's where Tammy Swailes lived for a while and she said there is an Open Bible church there. That would be crazy amazing to see. I mean my church branch in a different country. How fricken awesome! Plus its supposed to be beautiful. After we were all refreshed, we started walking towards the main things, which to us were the Todaiji Temple and the Kasuga Taisha shrine. Right when we got into the park there were tons and tons of deer all over the place. It was insane. I live in Washington so there are tons and tons of deer, but I have definitely never ever seen deer like this. They were walking up to people and walking in the streets and just chilling everywhere. They were tame and not afraid of people at all. Julie and I split some Deer crackers that tons of venders were selling on the sides of the sidewalks and fed them to the deer. It was abs
olutely crazy! So incredibly much fun! I can't believe that the deer were just like walking up to us and eating out of our hands. The male deer were pushy with their antlers, but not in like a mean way, just like they wanted to get out attention. The deer were cool also because when you pet them they seemed like dogs where they would like nuzzle up to your hand and stuff. If you made eye contact with them at all they would like follow you also. Oh also , Deer chew like cows. I didn't know that. But they were all just chilling in the grass chewing sideways like cows do. So incredibly cool! Definitely had to purrel the crap out of our hands after that though. Next we went to the Kasuga Taisha shrine, which was pretty cool. The outside of it was pretty awesome, but very similar to many of the other shrines we have seen. While we were walking to the next thing, Todaiji, we were on this like out of the way path going through trees and stuff. It was absolutely beautiful. However, the beauty of Nara was temporarily overshadowed by a horrifying image that should not have happened. Lol. Randi, Julie, and I were walking down the path and we see this guy sitting on a bike with what looks like a nude colored fanny pack from far away. As we get closer, we see that it is not a fanny pack, not at all. Instead it is this dude with his thing hanging out sitting on a bike just peeing in the middle of the pack. I'm pretty sure that that was something I definitely did not wish to view as I was walking to see a beautiful temple / the big Buddha. Ugh. Not socially acceptable in America, and definitely not in the more conservative Japan. Bleh. Anyways, we shook that image out of ou
r heads and kept trecking on. Finally we got to Todaiji, which is basically the whole reason to come to Nara. It is absolutely beautiful. You walk in and can see this huge building that houses the biggest Buddha in Japan. It is really neat to be able to say that I have now seen the largest and the second largest Buddhas in Japan! Woot Woot! I couldn't believe that this Buddha was like inside a temple thing though. It looked crazy big, but I guess it would have to be to house the largest Buddha. The funny thing is that from first glance the Buddha actually looked smaller than the one in Kamakura. We decided that it was probably due to the fact that this one was raised off the ground so it didn't even start until a certain amount up and it looked smaller. But then walking around it you could
definitely tell how stinking massive it was. Absolutely amazing to see. The Todaiji was also crazy amazing because it was kind of like a museum too. The huge Buddha had two other golden buddhas around it, and then there was other stuff on display, like a couple of warrior heads, other large statues, and stuff. Very worth the 500 yen to get into the temple. That was the last thing we did in Nara because we wanted to get to Osaka, and we figured there were always more temples and shrines we could go see. The Buddha was the main thing, and for me the deer. Awesome. On our way out we stopped at a couple of the stores and I ended up finding a couple of sweet shirts. One of them has Kangi on it, and the other one says I heart Japan. Woot! I have been looking everywhere for those but for some reason it is impossible to find smalls of the souvenir tees anywhere. It is probably because the Japanese people don’t think there are any small Americans or something lol. But anyways, I found them and was able to check that off my list of things to get. The train to Osaka was very easy to figure out and it only took us like 45 mins at the very most to get there. Very convenient that the two cities were so incredibly close together. We got dropped of a the Osaka Namba station, which was right in the middle of some of the stuff that was on our list of things to do, which was really cool. The downside was that Osaka was like way hotter than Nara was. Bleh. Again, so glad for that sweat towel. A breeze sure would have been nice though. The first thing we saw, which was literally right outside our station was Namba Parks. It is this huge office building that has a garden attached to it. The garden is built in this like cool way with these swirly paths built into it. It is way cooler from aerial shots, but it was an office building so we couldn’t get up to the top. We did however just figure out how to get up onto the eighth floor and went beside one of the offices and took pictures out the window. Success! After that we wandered around a little. Namba is in the Minami district, which is the southern I think district in Osaka. It is really well known for shopping and stuff like that. We saw tons and tons of stores in the Shinsaibashi-Suji Shopping Street. It was tons of streets and were covered on the top. So it wasn’t indoors, but it was a covered walking area. It made it nice walking through because you could feel the air conditioning from all the stores coming out. There were so many streets in this thing that there were stoplights inbetween. Which thinking about it I’m not sure why there were streetlights when there were no cars and it was just hoards of people walking through this outdoor mall kind of thing. I saw one store that had these fricken awesome heels for ten dollars. How could I not stop there. They were on sale from like 40. I ended up getting two pairs, which for 20 dollars, well I guess 2000 yen is like the best deal ever!!!! My size is LL, which is the biggest size they have. At first I didn’t fit into one of the pairs I really wanted and was bummed, but then ha I remembered I was wearing two pairs of socks so my feet wouldn’t blister. Problem solved and I got two amazing hot pairs of heels. I’m so excited to wear them with basically anything. Although it was kind of a hassle carrying around two pairs of shoes in bag for the rest of the trip since they definitely didn’t fit into my heavy full backpack. Speaking of backpack, I could barely fit into that tiny shoe store. I kept forgetting how big my bag was and running into people. Definitely got some dirty looks from some Japanese folks. Also I was carrying around my awesome crepe I got. This one was a tropical crepe. Even though I don’t really like Bananas, I really enjoyed it in this. It was an ice cream cone with a frozen banana in it, and then it was wrapped in a fresh crepe with three scoops of different fruit flavored sorbet with peach on top. Oh my gosh it was like the best thing ever. I love Japan. We also saw Americamura which is kind of like Harajuku but more Americanized stores. That was a little bit of a disappointment because in the pictures there is this huge clown head on one of the stores, but it wasn’t there anymore and they had this little tiny one instead. Oh well. Still fun to explore. Dotombori, which is the center of Minami had this huge cool looking lobster thing on it. We also found this huge underground shopping mall called Crysta Nagahori. Stinking awesome. Best idea ever especially since it is so hot. Much better underground.But the construction of it and everything was absolutely beau
tiful. After that we headed to the Umeda Sky building, which is this massive building with the Floating Garden Observatory uptop. It was amazing to go up into and look down. The best part was that the observatory, which was 173 meters high, didn't have any glass, just these huge bars and so we could take crazy clear pictures! We stopped and rested there for a little while because we were overheating, but it was nice to just sit and look out on the amazing city. After we finished basking in the glory that was Japan fr
om up high we headed to the Osaka Castle, which is basically the main reason to come to Osaka. We got off at this one station which was at the base of the castle grounds, and then we walked to the castle. When we finally got there like 20 minutes later even though we were drenched in sweat it was amazing! The castle was absolutely beautiful. It had a place where there was supposed to be a moat around it, but the moat was now called the Dry Moat and it had moss all up in everywhere. It looked amazing though. And the castle. Man that thing was just gorgeous. We went inside of it, and it was cool to see some of the historical stuff inside of it, but the outside was definitely where it was at. The very top we were able to go out and take pictures of the grounds and stuff. The sun was just starting to set when we were up there so it was perfect lighting for pictures. The sun when its up super high sometimes makes our pictures too bright. By the time we were done there we headed to Hotel Taiyo, which was our hostel for the night. It was literally like a 30 second walk from a subway stop so it was really easy to find, although at first we were headed the wrong direction. Karly and Tanner, who had been in Osaka, met us there and we all checked in together. We h
ad two double rooms and one single room. It was Japanese style, which was actually kind of cool to experience so they were these mat things rolled out on the floor with these like bean filled pillows instead of actual bedding. But hey, part of the culture, there was air conditioning, And running water. For only 1500 yen I was totally down. The funny thing about this hostel was how little the doors were. It was so funny. Tanner was definitely too big to fit into his room without like crazy bending over. I didn 'T end up taking a shower that night because the shower rooms had divided hours where girls could go or boys could go, but it was like a community shower. I'm just not comfortable with it, even though I know that's kind of what they do here. So I wet down a towel and washed myself off without jumping naked in the shower like everyone else and then washed my hair in the sink. I still felt very clean and refreshed. That night after we all ate and rested for a little bit we all went out to see the Tsutenkaku tower at night. It looked beautiful. In fact
, That whole area just looked amazing. Right under the tower there was this whole strip of restaurants that were called kashi kushi restaurants. Basically, everything was deepfired and amazing. Like deepfried banana, strawberry, (which the one with that closed so I didn 'T get to try it!!! !!!!) Potato, all kinds of meats, etc. Best idea for restaurants ever right. Holla. We went to two different ones, and the waiters were outside like trying to get people to come into their restaurants. It was super hilarious. The one across the street from where we ate did this like snake dance trying to get us to come. We went to the one we were at, but promised to come by after. Mostly we chose the one we went to because it had beer for 180 yen. Crazy cheap. My reasoning, the deep fried ice cream was 50 yen cheaper.: P. Although I did try the beer. It was actually really good, and went perfectly with the deep fried food. We took note of the competitiveness of the waiters and decided to do the Iggle Wiggle song from camp with them before going to the restaurant across the street. It is basically t
his song where two groups are competing for who can do moves better . We recorded it on my camera, and it was crazy hilarious to have the waiters try and do it with us. I realized as we were doing all this that that night was the first time we had really been out in a city during the night . Every other time we are just sleeping, on base, or on a bus. Not like going out to see stuff at night. Cities are so pretty at night with all the lights and stuff. Randi, Julie, and I woke up at around six thirty the next day to try and see Tennoji park. We get there and of course it doesn't open til nine thirty. It was still pretty from the outside though, although there were these crazy bugs that make the most loudest noise ever and there were probably millions of them down this one path. I just wanted to shoot either myself or all of them. Ah. When we were sitting for a little bit before going to catch a train to our bus to go home this Japanese guy (who was kind of a creeper) offered me a seat and then sat for like ten minutes talking to me. After I wasn 'T responding and looked at him for a while like huh he was like Japanese? Japanese? You Japanese? Awesome. A Japanese guy thought I was Japanese. Have fun with that one Braden and Daddy: p.;). Finally I was like shrugging and saying no Japanese over and over until his friend was like American! And yelling at this dude. I turned away and was just looking at a map for a little while and then I heard him start singing. I couldn't understand it because it was in Japanese, but then I recognized the tune. He was definitely singing it to me, because I looked at him and he was staring at me. Then he got to the chorus. "Kirring me softry wich his rove." I about died. It was adorable. I loved how the chorus was the only part in English. Oh Japan. But thankfully we left the creepy guy who was professing his love to me and headed to find our bus home. It left at 10:10, which is early, but much much cheaper than trying to figure out the trains or doing the bullet train. This bus, Which was through the JR, was a bit roomier, but I found it harder to sleep in because I couldn't put my legs on the seat in front of me. The cool thing about it was that it was a double decker bus. Always wanted to travel on one of those. It is weird to me that driving like across the whole of Japan is like driving to Seattle or maybe a little further from Spokane. After like a seven and a half hour bus ride we got dropped off on the side of the highway and had to walk to a station to take back to our station, Sagamino. Very eventful trip, didn 't get really burned, had a lot of fun, and definitely know I'm not going to take so much to Hiroshima. My back is killing me! But a very successful and fun weekend!
olutely crazy! So incredibly much fun! I can't believe that the deer were just like walking up to us and eating out of our hands. The male deer were pushy with their antlers, but not in like a mean way, just like they wanted to get out attention. The deer were cool also because when you pet them they seemed like dogs where they would like nuzzle up to your hand and stuff. If you made eye contact with them at all they would like follow you also. Oh also , Deer chew like cows. I didn't know that. But they were all just chilling in the grass chewing sideways like cows do. So incredibly cool! Definitely had to purrel the crap out of our hands after that though. Next we went to the Kasuga Taisha shrine, which was pretty cool. The outside of it was pretty awesome, but very similar to many of the other shrines we have seen. While we were walking to the next thing, Todaiji, we were on this like out of the way path going through trees and stuff. It was absolutely beautiful. However, the beauty of Nara was temporarily overshadowed by a horrifying image that should not have happened. Lol. Randi, Julie, and I were walking down the path and we see this guy sitting on a bike with what looks like a nude colored fanny pack from far away. As we get closer, we see that it is not a fanny pack, not at all. Instead it is this dude with his thing hanging out sitting on a bike just peeing in the middle of the pack. I'm pretty sure that that was something I definitely did not wish to view as I was walking to see a beautiful temple / the big Buddha. Ugh. Not socially acceptable in America, and definitely not in the more conservative Japan. Bleh. Anyways, we shook that image out of ou
r heads and kept trecking on. Finally we got to Todaiji, which is basically the whole reason to come to Nara. It is absolutely beautiful. You walk in and can see this huge building that houses the biggest Buddha in Japan. It is really neat to be able to say that I have now seen the largest and the second largest Buddhas in Japan! Woot Woot! I couldn't believe that this Buddha was like inside a temple thing though. It looked crazy big, but I guess it would have to be to house the largest Buddha. The funny thing is that from first glance the Buddha actually looked smaller than the one in Kamakura. We decided that it was probably due to the fact that this one was raised off the ground so it didn't even start until a certain amount up and it looked smaller. But then walking around it you could 
definitely tell how stinking massive it was. Absolutely amazing to see. The Todaiji was also crazy amazing because it was kind of like a museum too. The huge Buddha had two other golden buddhas around it, and then there was other stuff on display, like a couple of warrior heads, other large statues, and stuff. Very worth the 500 yen to get into the temple. That was the last thing we did in Nara because we wanted to get to Osaka, and we figured there were always more temples and shrines we could go see. The Buddha was the main thing, and for me the deer. Awesome. On our way out we stopped at a couple of the stores and I ended up finding a couple of sweet shirts. One of them has Kangi on it, and the other one says I heart Japan. Woot! I have been looking everywhere for those but for some reason it is impossible to find smalls of the souvenir tees anywhere. It is probably because the Japanese people don’t think there are any small Americans or something lol. But anyways, I found them and was able to check that off my list of things to get. The train to Osaka was very easy to figure out and it only took us like 45 mins at the very most to get there. Very convenient that the two cities were so incredibly close together. We got dropped of a the Osaka Namba station, which was right in the middle of some of the stuff that was on our list of things to do, which was really cool. The downside was that Osaka was like way hotter than Nara was. Bleh. Again, so glad for that sweat towel. A breeze sure would have been nice though. The first thing we saw, which was literally right outside our station was Namba Parks. It is this huge office building that has a garden attached to it. The garden is built in this like cool way with these swirly paths built into it. It is way cooler from aerial shots, but it was an office building so we couldn’t get up to the top. We did however just figure out how to get up onto the eighth floor and went beside one of the offices and took pictures out the window. Success! After that we wandered around a little. Namba is in the Minami district, which is the southern I think district in Osaka. It is really well known for shopping and stuff like that. We saw tons and tons of stores in the Shinsaibashi-Suji Shopping Street. It was tons of streets and were covered on the top. So it wasn’t indoors, but it was a covered walking area. It made it nice walking through because you could feel the air conditioning from all the stores coming out. There were so many streets in this thing that there were stoplights inbetween. Which thinking about it I’m not sure why there were streetlights when there were no cars and it was just hoards of people walking through this outdoor mall kind of thing. I saw one store that had these fricken awesome heels for ten dollars. How could I not stop there. They were on sale from like 40. I ended up getting two pairs, which for 20 dollars, well I guess 2000 yen is like the best deal ever!!!! My size is LL, which is the biggest size they have. At first I didn’t fit into one of the pairs I really wanted and was bummed, but then ha I remembered I was wearing two pairs of socks so my feet wouldn’t blister. Problem solved and I got two amazing hot pairs of heels. I’m so excited to wear them with basically anything. Although it was kind of a hassle carrying around two pairs of shoes in bag for the rest of the trip since they definitely didn’t fit into my heavy full backpack. Speaking of backpack, I could barely fit into that tiny shoe store. I kept forgetting how big my bag was and running into people. Definitely got some dirty looks from some Japanese folks. Also I was carrying around my awesome crepe I got. This one was a tropical crepe. Even though I don’t really like Bananas, I really enjoyed it in this. It was an ice cream cone with a frozen banana in it, and then it was wrapped in a fresh crepe with three scoops of different fruit flavored sorbet with peach on top. Oh my gosh it was like the best thing ever. I love Japan. We also saw Americamura which is kind of like Harajuku but more Americanized stores. That was a little bit of a disappointment because in the pictures there is this huge clown head on one of the stores, but it wasn’t there anymore and they had this little tiny one instead. Oh well. Still fun to explore. Dotombori, which is the center of Minami had this huge cool looking lobster thing on it. We also found this huge underground shopping mall called Crysta Nagahori. Stinking awesome. Best idea ever especially since it is so hot. Much better underground.But the construction of it and everything was absolutely beau
tiful. After that we headed to the Umeda Sky building, which is this massive building with the Floating Garden Observatory uptop. It was amazing to go up into and look down. The best part was that the observatory, which was 173 meters high, didn't have any glass, just these huge bars and so we could take crazy clear pictures! We stopped and rested there for a little while because we were overheating, but it was nice to just sit and look out on the amazing city. After we finished basking in the glory that was Japan fr
om up high we headed to the Osaka Castle, which is basically the main reason to come to Osaka. We got off at this one station which was at the base of the castle grounds, and then we walked to the castle. When we finally got there like 20 minutes later even though we were drenched in sweat it was amazing! The castle was absolutely beautiful. It had a place where there was supposed to be a moat around it, but the moat was now called the Dry Moat and it had moss all up in everywhere. It looked amazing though. And the castle. Man that thing was just gorgeous. We went inside of it, and it was cool to see some of the historical stuff inside of it, but the outside was definitely where it was at. The very top we were able to go out and take pictures of the grounds and stuff. The sun was just starting to set when we were up there so it was perfect lighting for pictures. The sun when its up super high sometimes makes our pictures too bright. By the time we were done there we headed to Hotel Taiyo, which was our hostel for the night. It was literally like a 30 second walk from a subway stop so it was really easy to find, although at first we were headed the wrong direction. Karly and Tanner, who had been in Osaka, met us there and we all checked in together. We h
ad two double rooms and one single room. It was Japanese style, which was actually kind of cool to experience so they were these mat things rolled out on the floor with these like bean filled pillows instead of actual bedding. But hey, part of the culture, there was air conditioning, And running water. For only 1500 yen I was totally down. The funny thing about this hostel was how little the doors were. It was so funny. Tanner was definitely too big to fit into his room without like crazy bending over. I didn 'T end up taking a shower that night because the shower rooms had divided hours where girls could go or boys could go, but it was like a community shower. I'm just not comfortable with it, even though I know that's kind of what they do here. So I wet down a towel and washed myself off without jumping naked in the shower like everyone else and then washed my hair in the sink. I still felt very clean and refreshed. That night after we all ate and rested for a little bit we all went out to see the Tsutenkaku tower at night. It looked beautiful. In fact
, That whole area just looked amazing. Right under the tower there was this whole strip of restaurants that were called kashi kushi restaurants. Basically, everything was deepfired and amazing. Like deepfried banana, strawberry, (which the one with that closed so I didn 'T get to try it!!! !!!!) Potato, all kinds of meats, etc. Best idea for restaurants ever right. Holla. We went to two different ones, and the waiters were outside like trying to get people to come into their restaurants. It was super hilarious. The one across the street from where we ate did this like snake dance trying to get us to come. We went to the one we were at, but promised to come by after. Mostly we chose the one we went to because it had beer for 180 yen. Crazy cheap. My reasoning, the deep fried ice cream was 50 yen cheaper.: P. Although I did try the beer. It was actually really good, and went perfectly with the deep fried food. We took note of the competitiveness of the waiters and decided to do the Iggle Wiggle song from camp with them before going to the restaurant across the street. It is basically t
his song where two groups are competing for who can do moves better . We recorded it on my camera, and it was crazy hilarious to have the waiters try and do it with us. I realized as we were doing all this that that night was the first time we had really been out in a city during the night . Every other time we are just sleeping, on base, or on a bus. Not like going out to see stuff at night. Cities are so pretty at night with all the lights and stuff. Randi, Julie, and I woke up at around six thirty the next day to try and see Tennoji park. We get there and of course it doesn't open til nine thirty. It was still pretty from the outside though, although there were these crazy bugs that make the most loudest noise ever and there were probably millions of them down this one path. I just wanted to shoot either myself or all of them. Ah. When we were sitting for a little bit before going to catch a train to our bus to go home this Japanese guy (who was kind of a creeper) offered me a seat and then sat for like ten minutes talking to me. After I wasn 'T responding and looked at him for a while like huh he was like Japanese? Japanese? You Japanese? Awesome. A Japanese guy thought I was Japanese. Have fun with that one Braden and Daddy: p.;). Finally I was like shrugging and saying no Japanese over and over until his friend was like American! And yelling at this dude. I turned away and was just looking at a map for a little while and then I heard him start singing. I couldn't understand it because it was in Japanese, but then I recognized the tune. He was definitely singing it to me, because I looked at him and he was staring at me. Then he got to the chorus. "Kirring me softry wich his rove." I about died. It was adorable. I loved how the chorus was the only part in English. Oh Japan. But thankfully we left the creepy guy who was professing his love to me and headed to find our bus home. It left at 10:10, which is early, but much much cheaper than trying to figure out the trains or doing the bullet train. This bus, Which was through the JR, was a bit roomier, but I found it harder to sleep in because I couldn't put my legs on the seat in front of me. The cool thing about it was that it was a double decker bus. Always wanted to travel on one of those. It is weird to me that driving like across the whole of Japan is like driving to Seattle or maybe a little further from Spokane. After like a seven and a half hour bus ride we got dropped off on the side of the highway and had to walk to a station to take back to our station, Sagamino. Very eventful trip, didn 't get really burned, had a lot of fun, and definitely know I'm not going to take so much to Hiroshima. My back is killing me! But a very successful and fun weekend!
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