most epic weekend

so last weekend was huge! sorry for not posting sooner, ive been super busy with school (midterms and all). first and foremost big ups to dave and emily for taking care of second camera duty during the trip (and also letting me tag along with them a majority of the weekend) they took a bunch of these photos with the point and shoot…. as i mentioned in the last post, i spontaneously left on the shinkansen (best invention ever!) at the behest of my dad, for osaka/kyoto/nara… and it was rad! first night was kind of a bust, just cheap drinking and then sleeping at an internet cafe…

shots from the shinkansen

sunday in osaka was way more epic!

this is osaka castle… rad!

epic moat!

fishing in the moat… notice the little cut-out algae fishing hoop things

im pretty sure this is an arhat, something i learned about in asian art history in shoreline… but they just beg for alms all the time… in the name of buddhism… i kicked down some yen for the cause

this is osaka castle, super epic!! wikipedia says that it played a major role in the unification of Japan during the sixteenth century of the Azuchi-Momoyama period. major stuff.. of course like most things in japan, it burned down in an earthquake and it was refurbished and turned into a museum.. so the inside is kinda boring (aside from all the awesome museum info-ness)… but sen rikyuu is the man… he invented the tea ceremony

bikes! i think this is a single speed though, it seems to have front and rear brakes

looking down the osaka castle well

after osaka castle, it was on to the “floating garden observatory” which was in fact not a garden at all.. just an observatory on top of an awesomely constructed building

this is the escalator up from the 30-something floor to the 4oth

heres a photo from the actual observatory

no skanking! no skating!

then we ate killer okonomiyaki which is this pancake/omelette thing but its not really a pancake or an omelette.. discuss! the cook/owner was super nice and he gave us our little spatulas to take with us! nice guy! then dave and i walked around osaka for a while… he looked up a bar he wanted to go to, and after getting super lost… we found A POKEMON CENTER!!! i don’t know what goes on at a pokemon center, but someday i’ll have to find out. so the quest for artemis bar continued…

and then i rocked out. then we got really lost and found a giant whale

we recruited 2 separate trios of people, and they guided us to the bar! then dave caught the train back to the kyoto hostel where i couldnt get a bed, and i walked around some more and then went to the internet cafe and passed out in a little cubicle.

now kyoto!!!

nijo castle was super super cool! heres a snippet from wikipedia about ninomaru palace (there are 2 palaces on the grounds…)

In 1601 Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of Tokugawa Shogunate ordered all the feudal lords in Western Japan to contribute to the construction of the Nijō Castle. The construction was completed during the reign of Tokugawa Iemitsu in 1626. It was built as the Kyoto residence of the Tokugawa Shoguns.

The central keep or donjon was struck by lightning and burned to the ground in 1750.

In 1788 the Inner Palace was destroyed by a city-wide fire. The site remained empty until 1862.

In 1867 the Ninomaru Palace was the stage for the declaration by Tokugawa Yoshinobu, returning the authority to the Imperial Court. Next year the Imperial Cabinet was installed in the castle. In 1939 the palace was donated to the city of Kyoto and opened to the public the following year.

there are tons of awesome paintings on the walls, but they arent protected by the sun very well, so all the windows are shuttered and theres no real lighting in the room. i’m sure it didnt help that i went on a cloudy day either. one super epic feature are the “nightingale floors” that squeak all the time, so that ninjas couldnt attempt late night assassinations.

super cool garden

you cant go inside of honmaru palace, but when the walot shogunate takes over japan, i call this one

then it was time to check into the hostel, and i took a shower… and dave and i rented bikes, which was a genius idea.. we covered so much ground, and got to ride mama chari!

we went to a bunch of temples and shrines, but it was kind of late in the day so most of them were closed.

sacred sake

this guy was chanting in a very cool fashion

this is a crazy restaurant i think

then dave went back to the hostel to do homework and i found a killer reggae bar and hung out there for a little bit, listening to all the reggae jams of the 60′s and 70′s… and a little 80′s… but there wasn’t alot of good music in the 80′s…

the next morning we left for nara, with a stop at the inari shrine… on the train this guy had cool shoes with brass knuckles on them

Fushimi Inari Taisha (伏見稲荷大社, Fushimi Inari Taisha^?) is the head shrine of Inari, located in Fushimi-ku, Kyoto, Japan. The shrine sits at the base of a mountain also named Inari, and includes trails up the mountain to many smaller shrines.

the inari shrines are all about foxes (kitsune) and this particular shrine has possibly thousands of toriis lining the trails up the mountain! epic! beautiful! huge!

this is one of the main statues.. the fox is holding a key to the rice granary… inari are often worshipped by merchants for business prosperity

you see that paper tied around the foxes tail? thats from the japanese fortune lottery… theres like cylinder with sticks in it, you shake it up and one sticks out of the little hole on top with a number on it… and that corresponds to a fortune. if you get a bad fortune, you are supposed to tie it on a tree, but i guess the fox works too. i got a good fortune though, so no worries.

all over are these bells, i think you pray and then ring the bell so that the inari hear your prayer

these are the torii gates lining the trail/path… i think this shrine has the most toriis in japan… the trail goes all the way up the mountain

i blended 6 photos to make this killer panoramic shot at the top of the mountain… to see it larger click here.

when you enter a temple or shrine you are supposed to wash your hands and mouth with these things… this was a particularly cool model

for some reason there was a little crab on the mountain.

at the top of the mountain we ate kitsune udon… i guess at bigger shrines they have udon noodle soup with ingredients that the kami there likes… hence fox udon… it has inari (fried tofu soaked in some kind of sweet vinegar) in it. which doesnt make sense to me because why would a fox eat tofu? either way it tasted great and it was in a very scenic setting. then i saw this cat and i stopped to pet it and it just crawled into my lap! it wouldnt even get off, i had to force it off me and put it down, cute though.

cute!

then i got to pet a shiba inu! inu means dog by the way.. i know akita inus are called akitas because thats the city/region/prefecture they are from.. akita. i wonder if thats the case with shiba inus? ill look it up on wikipedia…

nope i was wrong… heres yet another blurb from wikipedia

The word shiba usually refers to a type of red shrub. This leads some to believe that the Shiba was named with this in mind, either because the dogs were used to hunt in wild shrubs, or because the most common color of the Shiba Inu is a red color similar to that of the shrubs. However, in old Japanese, the word shiba also had the meaning of “small”, thus this might be a reference to the dog’s small size. Therefore, the Shiba Inu is sometimes translated as “Little Brushwood Dog.”

Anyways, I think we went the wrong way off the mountain and ended up walking for 45 minutes to a train station through some town… but it turned out to be advantageous since the new stop we were at was an express train stop and the inari stop wasn’t, so we saved about 30 minutes on the train ride to nara

nara was awesome! theres todai-ji, which has the biggest buddha in japan… and more importantly TONS OF DEER! DEER THAT YOU CAN PET! AND CUTE BABY DEER! these sika deer are thought to be shinto messengers for the gods, they just cruise around the area

heres the pudding… see the proof, its in that pudding.

this deer is drinking deer urine off the street

the male deer get pretty pushy, and they start to headbutt you… progressively harder… i was walking around trying to feed the littlest deer and this bull deer would follow me around and keep butting me harder and harder

deer trying to fight over and open some human food product

i like how only that little bit of fur is in focus

awww

deer biting dave. dave was kind of terrified of the deer after this

why the hell youd ever bring your cat with you to the deer park, i’ll never know. needless to say this cat was absolutely terrified

this deer took our itinerary out of my back pocket and ate most of it. good thing this was the last part of the trip. we also got good luck envelopes for buying a restoration tile to help restore todai-ji, and in the envelope was an awesome drawing of the vairocana (cosmic) buddha.. but a deer also pulled it out of my back pocket and ate it.

this is me about to be headbutted by a deer

oh yeah, theres also todai-ji… which has the biggest statue of buddha in japan. the buddha is 15 meters tall and weighs 500 metric tons. the todai-ji building is also the largest wooden building in the world

this is it. its absolutely enormous! and cool.

this is the tile we split.

i think these are protectors of the vairocana buddha

these are also protecting buddha i think

outside of todai-ji

replicas of the lotus petals in the statue

helping dave overcome his fear of deer

last but not least was the pillar you crawl through. the hole in the pillar is the size of nostril of the statue, if you can crawl through it you will supposedly have an easier time reaching enlightenment

this weekend was a blast! i highly recommend osaka, kyoto and nara!