Nara: Thursday, December 2 - Saturday, December 4

[escapewindow]

[mosquitos]

From Miyajima, we took the ferry, the train back to Hiroshima, the shinkansen back to Kyoto, then the train down to Nara, Japan's first capital.

On Thursday night, there were mosquitos.

I was surfing the web in my yukata and noticed a number of bites on my left leg and another couple on my right, all itching fiercely. I started hunting them down, and managed to kill a couple.

While we were in our futons trying to sleep, the mosquitos would buzz right by our ears. I tried staying completely under the covers, but ended up with a bunch of bites on my forehead. Plus I was hot. So I eventually gave up, and got eaten alive. I still have some of the bites.

(Not unlike Loft Ness back when I didn't have window screens, actually. I love those things, screens. Screens that cover the whole window. Screens that stop making you choose between overheating and getting bitten to death, neither of which allow you to sleep.)

I thought I was the only one, since mosquitos tend to love me, but we all had a somewhat sleepless night.

The next day I went on a mosquito killing rampage. I neared double digits killed, each of them plump full of our blood that smeared on the wall as they died.

That was definitely the low point, there, but things got better. And we slept well the next night.

[todai-ji]

On Friday we went to Todai-ji to see the Daibutsu (big buddha)... which was actually the reason I brought the fisheye lens. (I was worried it might be too large to get in one shot, and thought the fisheye might see more use than my 17-40, but it turns out my 24-105 was wide enough. Ah well.)

The two flanking towers are no longer there.
The daibutsu-den, along with the daibutsu's head, were rebuilt after an earthquake.
The daibutsu's body is hundreds of years older.


A miniature of the daibutsu-den, with a miniature daibutsu inside.

[aki gets bored]

At this point, while still inside the daibutsu-den, I got bored. I think two full weeks of mainly shooting with the 24-105 on my 5D Mark II did it. Plus nipple-salad.livejournal.com's comments here about liking my IR shots.

I put the 24-105 on my IR camera. And kept it there for the rest of the day. I put my previously pretty-much-ignored 50mm on my 5dmkii. I was ready for everything to pretty much suck after that, but it was cool.

What a sky.







All that IR interrupted by a flurry of decent 50mm pics:


I'm not a huge fan of the 50mm 1.4 bokeh, but it works.


And the variety's nice.


Really, I think I would have been best served leaving my 50mm and fisheye at home, putting my 17-85mm on the IR camera, so both cameras would be ready to go at any point.
Now I know.

... MOAR IR.

Then I went back to the hotel, and then flew home the next day, and didn't look at these pictures until I many days later.

[himo-den]

I spent Friday afternoon on another search for a game called String Railway for Aaron.

I had already tried the 4-block shopping street by the hotel on Thursday, so I wandered a bit further, ducking into a few stores and asking, "Himo-den arimasuka?" (which is probably grammatically wrong) and pushing the piece of paper with the name written down in Japanese and English at them.

No one had heard of it, really. The airport was my last ditch effort, no luck. (Then again, maybe it was there, but was sold out. Sorry Aaron!)

But I did end up finding an English copy of Ode to Kirihito, which I purchased, and read on the plane. Very, very odd.

Still, it was nice wandering around the city, without my heavy camera bag, in the light rain.

[the feeding of the shika]

Street vendors sell shika-sembe (deer crackers) which aren't made from deer; they're made to feed to deer. Aww.

Every morning at 9:30, they blow a horn in the park, the shika gather, and people feed them shika-sembe. The hotel gave us a coupon for a free pack of shika-sembe, and we were kind of burnt on other sightseeing things, so on Saturday we went to the park to feed shika.

They let us know what would happen (1096? shika in the park, feed them, and hold your hands up to show you don't have any more. And for god's sake don't put any in your purse or pocket.)

My mother handed the shika-sembe vendor the coupon, and got the first stack of shika-sembe while the last of the deer were still arriving. I think they noticed.

They definitely didn't give up until you show your empty hands.

I got the next stack and they were a little less pushy, since they were further spread out between people at that point. But I accidentally dropped the strip of paper that had been wrapping the shika-sembe, and a shika gobbled that up, too.

That was so fun. And funny. I didn't mind that I never answered the question, "what is shika-sembe made of? and what does it taste like?"

Afterwards I followed a baby shika around and filmed it for a bit.

[wrapup]

This was an amazing trip. I had so much fun and got to spend time with my parents, who live in SoCal. Lots of good food, lots of beautiful places. And monkies. And deer. And Hiko-nyan!

We definitely were burning out on the trip a little bit near the end... so much walking, so many temples. At one point I was looking forward to getting back to work, so I could sit all day.

I think my photography chops are back, and are about to become rusty again. I kind of want to take a photowalk in SF again, maybe this weekend.

I think I had more to say, but if I can't remember, it must not have been that important.

... The full set of pics from Nara are here.