A deer city: Nara

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We arrived at Nara station in the afternoon and decided to walk the 6 kilometres to our hotel to save the £10 that a taxi would have cost. We quickly regretted that decision. Our bags have recently put on weight - my bag weighted 7 kilos when I left Paris 5 months ago and is now almost 12 kilos! We were very tired so we stopped on the way and ate a snack from the convenience store in the middle of the street.
We finally made it to our hotel, which was very nice and cost us the same price as the hostel in Osaka! There was a bathtub/jacuzzi so the first thing we did when we got there was to make use of it! We ordered food to our room in the evening.
On the next day, we were supposed to wake up early and walk 7,5 kilometres to Nara park. We barely heard the alarm at 7am and got woken up by the phone at midday, and then the whole room came alive : all of the lights, the TV, the radio... Everything turned on! Apparently, the hotel staff can remotely turn all of the devices on and off and decided it was time for us to wake up. It scared us!!
We had lunch at McDonald's (cheapest food but also only food around!) and didn't do much all day. I wanted to use the karaoke in the room (if not in Japan, where else?!) but everything was in Japanese!
In the evening, we had a microwave meal we had bought at the shop. On the next morning, we finally got up early. Shaun was a bit annoyed at me because I made him a hot chocolate in the morning and he kept saying it wasn't nice and I didn't understand why until I realised I hadn't used the hot chocolate powder but the milk tea... We took a taxi to Nara station. The taxi was supposed to cost about 10 pounds but ended up costing almost twice the price (which equaled the price of one night at the hotel!). We left our big bags in a locker at the station for 400 yen (about £2,50) and walked to the park. The park was full of dears and some were very curious so they sniffed our pockets for food!
We had fun with them for a while, then walked to Todai-ji temple, seeing more deers on the way, including lots near shops and in the streets.
We sat on a bench near the small lake opposite of the temple and enjoyed the peace and quiet - until some tourists decided to stand in front of us to take pictures of the deers just next to us... As if there weren't another hundred deers nearby.
We walked back into the city and bought some food at the convenience store before getting into a train for Kyoto.

Nara city is nothing special - but worth going to for the deers! Once you get near the park, you can see them everywhere and it really is fun to watch them. You can buy deer crackers (yep, it's apparently a thing!) to feed them but honestly, it was just more fun to watch other people trying to feed the deers one cracker at a time and the deers managing to take the whole pack out of the tourists!

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