Visting Nara and Uji!

My friend Yifan invited me to go to Nara and Uji with her this past Sunday. I had been meaning to visit Nara for a while, after hearing about the "sacred bowing deer" and curious as to what Uji was known for. We met at Imadegawa station, the one right next to Doshisha, and took the Kurasuma subway to Takeda station, where the line then changes to Kintetsu and continues for a VERY long time until we arrived in Nara. It probably took about an hour and a half for the entire journey. Nara is very far south from Kyoto, out in the country side. Nara Park 奈良公園 is known for the deer that walk around amongst the people, which you can feed senbei せんべい (small wafer like cookie thing) to the deer, which will bow in response to you bowing at them.

After walking around the park for a while, Yifan took us over to the bottom of a mountain, which had a spectacularly green hill at the base with all of these little white flowers mixed in. We stopped for some water and sat down to enjoy the view before making our way over to the trail to begin hiking the mountain.

After hiking up the mountain, we took a little snack break. Yifan brought some "apple fritters" that she bought at Seven Eleven, that we both decided were quite mid. I brought two oranges and two bananas, but placed them poorly within my sack and had discovered they had all been bruised into mush by my water bottle at that point, so I just left them in there and decided not to mention it out of embarrassment. We hiked down and back through the park, stopping at Saizeria for lunch before boarding the JR train from Nara to Uji. Saizeria is a chain restaurant where you can order Western dishes for absurdly low prices. Mind you the quality isn't great, but you can't really beat the quantity for price for the type of food in my opinion. Not bad.

Upon arriving to Uji, we learned our mutual friend Oo-san from Japanese class was still about 45 minutes away on the train, so Yifan and I walked around Uji, checked out the river, grabbed some matcha ice cream, and visited a small temple.

After meeting up with Oo-san, we visited the Phoenix temple, one of Uji's most popular. We walked around the outside of the temple and visited a museum (no pictures were allowed so I don't have any). Before leaving we visited the gift shop, where I picked out a pair of earrings with my the help of my friends, I'm sure you'll see them in upcoming posts. From there, we picked up some matcha souvenirs at a shop, and then headed towards dinner.

Uji, as I was told by Yifan, is actually the place in Japan where matcha originated from, hence why there was a matcha store literally every block in the area of town we walked through. For dinner, we visited a cute little diner that was anime themed and had extremely friendly staff. All three of us ordered katsu curry, which was delicious!