Osaka and Nara

---

Writing from the hostel in Osaka, where the keyboard is bilingual and refuses to space or punctuate, so apologies in advance.
This has gotta be one of the odder hostels I've stayed in - OCD neat and with many rules eg. you have to be in by 11pm, bathing between such and such time etc. Quite a wide demographic of boarders here, from gaijin tourists (like myself) to little old obaa-sans.

Everyone is painfully polite here, no spitting or trying to run you over. They sure have a lot of rules though >_<. People are pretty helpful in general. The subway is tricky to navigate if you don't live here...we got lost looking for Nara today, took us 2 hours going back and forth when it should have taken about 45mins. I suspect that's part of the reason why you see relatively few gaijin on the trains here - they all got swallowed up by the subway...at least it's impossible to starve to death here. Have been eating constantly since korea...combinis (convenience stores), small streetside restaurants and vending machines every few steps...O_o

Nara was worth it though - home to the worlds largest wooden construction, an uber-buddha and about 1200 sacred Nara deer, which you can feed and pet. You can buy sembe (rice crackers) to feed the deer with, after which they attempt to frisk you for other edibles...it was rather amusing to see small children and tourists being terrorised by the over zealous deer. I got accosted by several deer while Mikki just took photos of me and laughed.

After Nara we got on the shinkansen and went to Kyoto; we just ended up wandering about the station and having dinner there, before catching the shinkansen back to our hostel in Shin-Osaka. Hope to get a good look around Kyoto proper later this week. Osaka itself is massive, the second largest city in Japan after Tokyo. Loads of people, but they're a surprisingly normal and down to earth bunch.

---