We actually had homework this weekend, so my breakfast consisted of a bowl of instant noodles that wasn’t particularly good, before I then settled down and did most of the homework, minus the last question and a half or so, which I finished up after I came home.

In the meantime, partly fueled by wanderlust, partly by being bored, partly by needing an answer to the inevitable “So what did you do this weekend?” question tomorrow, and partly by an acquantance with whom I was chatting and who pointed out that a CD that I had wanted had actually come out five days ago and who knows if they still had First Print bonuses available at this point, I decided to venture out. Based on a very preliminary amount of research, as different music stores had different First Print bonus items, I was targetting a store named Shinseido, but I found out that the nearest Shinseido stores to me were southwest in Osaka, and south in Nara, and for some reason the city of Kyoto itself didn’t actually have one of these shops. There were a couple other shops I tried that looked like this too — it seemed like Osaka was far more commerce and/or anime friendly and Kyoto just didn’t have much.

Anyway, while these stores were “in another city”, all three cities were still more or less connected and both the stores were about an hour to an hour and a half away from me even after factoring local travel time to get to the train nexus stations. I had been to Osaka before, if only briefly, but I had never been to Nara before, so this sounded like a good excuse to jaunt down there. In particular, Nara’s Todaiji Temple (and its surrounding park, both of which are famous for all their deer) was a destination I could easily visit, and the stop with the Shinseido store was even directly along the way on my journey to Todaiji Temple.

So off I went. I hadn’t taken a train since Day 1, so it was nice and nostalgic or something. Like meeting up with an old friend again after some time of ignoring them and seeing someone else behind their back. Talking about meeting up with an old friend again though, this was a surprising find on the first train I boarded:

Just what the heck. That’s an ad for the little art gallery in the middle of nowhere that I randomly visited yesterday while waiting for the Chahan shop to open at 5pm. Featuring Ishimoto Sho and all that. The gallery and the actual displays were kind of small, and no one else was there at all when I was, so I was surprised to see something like that advertised here in front of me the very next day.

Anyway, I took a couple of trains and ended up at a station named Takanohara Station. There was an Aeon Mall there where my target store was — yet another Aeon Mall added to my list of visited Aeon Malls that I should really compile someday. It’s probably at approximately 12 or so. Takanohara is on the very edge of the Kyoto-Nara prefectural border, and actually, while I unfortunately had no idea about this while I was there, apparently the border itself actually cuts right through the mall (local)! Fascinating stuff.

I found my target Shinseido store in the mall, but they were out of stock of the CD, or possibly never even stocked it in the first place since the shop was a tiny one. Oh well and who knows. The next nearest shop was in Osaka and I had no plans to head out that way today, but if they weren’t sold out of First Print bonuses by now they definitely would be by next week. I put that problem aside for now and walked around the mall a little bit, capturing this Mother’s Day tribute for the ages:

I also quite easily found the food court:

And had a meal there from a fast food noodle store named Ringer Hut, except the food took forever to actually make. The food court was really crowded as well, but they gave me a buzzer to wait for my turn so I managed to get a table while waiting for my food to be made. I had Irodori Chanpon, where chanpon is a Nagasaki local noodle dish, and it looked like this:

It was pretty good. After lunch, I hopped back on the train, and took it to Nara proper, specifically to Kintetsu-Nara Station, which was about a 15 mniute walk away from Todaiji Temple. There were buses to take tourists and others to the temple itself, but it was also very much a walkable route, even in the on-again off-again rain, so I opted to walk.

Outside the station itself was a weird fountain, and then a nice-looking shopping street.

It should come to no one’s surprise that because I was alone, I got distracted and took a detour down that shopping street and into the neighbouring street from there. There I found an Animate store, which was another of the CD stores which had special First Print bonus items for the CD that I wanted to buy. They even had the CD in stock, still. I decided that this was fate, and came away with the CD in tow, plus a large, clear poster (that I had them roll up) that was actually better than the original bonus item from Shinseido that I was eyeing, which was just a small bromide, I think. I’m not particularly attached to the characters, but I do very much love the lead song from the album, and I take my seasonal favourite songs quite seriously. Also, 1,760 yen for 7 songs and an instrumental is pretty decent as Japanese anime CDs go.

Returning to the trail to Todaiji after that, I continued upon my way, and soon the famous Nara deer started to make their appearances. There were also plenty of little roadside stalls along the way that sold deer crackers, or shika (deer) senbei (rice crackers), that you could buy for 200 yen and then safely feed to the deer, who would then gather around you like moths to a flame. These stalls reminded me of.. oh, the various samey food trucks on every corner of New York’s Times Square area, or people in costume selling picture ops on the Las Vegas strip, or old folks selling incense and flowers outside famous Buddhist temples in Singapore — they’re all offering the same product or service, and the area was saturated with many people trying that same thing, but they all still seem to survive nonetheless.

Anyway I didn’t want the attention — I invoked the Chronicler’s First Creed of “Observe, Not Participate” here, and so I never bought any deer crackers to feed the deer. Instead, I watched others feed them, and watched the deer chase down people who had previously fed them crackers, in the hopes of more. I saw a couple people nodding politely at the deer and does, who would nod politely back — this was very strange, and quite incredulous, but yet apparently is a thing that some of the deer do do.

Talking about deer doodoo, there were also a number of actual souvenir stores set up near the temple itself too, and while they mostly sold keychains, handkerchiefs, antler headbands, and so on, but at least one store was selling said doodoo as a novelty item too.

I took and uploaded many pictures of the deer, both from before, during, and after my visit to Todaiji itself, and to simplify things I’m combining and putting them in a single gallery here. After a while, the novelty of seeing deer wandering the same pavements as humans wore off, and they were just deer doing deer-like things.