{"id":559,"date":"2012-05-24T10:56:10","date_gmt":"2012-05-24T01:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matero.net\/?p=559"},"modified":"2012-05-26T10:56:40","modified_gmt":"2012-05-26T01:56:40","slug":"japan-2012-nara-and-kyoto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/?p=559","title":{"rendered":"Japan 2012 (Nara and Kyoto)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leaving Osaka, I took the Kintetsu Nara Line eastwards to Yamatosaidaiji station. This station had a lot of choices for Japanese food inside. I chose the cheapest plate of curry rice<\/a> for $5. I put $3.75 in a coin operated locker to keep my heavy bag while I looked around the ancient capital of Nara. I changed to the Kintetsu Kashihara Line and got off at Nishinokyo station. Here it was a short walk to the world heritage site Yakushi-ji Temple<\/a>. Across the street was a memorial to Chinese traveler monk Xuanzang<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Walking north, I noticed a new Japanese style house being built. Interesting to get a peek at how it is built including a concrete foundation with a one foot high crawl space. Everything above that is wood except for the roof tiles and a few metal brackets. Next to the new house was another very old temple calls Toshodai-ji<\/a>. It was interesting to see how they rebuilt one of the structures over ten years.<\/p>\n

After some walking and another train, I made it to downtown Nara. I was here five years ago and noted the Kofuku-ji<\/a> temple had a plan to rebuild but maybe it would take 50 years. That was an exaggeration. They are making progress and have a schedule posted. Started construction in 2010 and will finish in 2018. Still quite a long time for a building with a single floor.\u00c2\u00a0 This time I made sure to visit the Kofuku-ji treasure house, which is a museum holding a lot of unique artifacts. The most famous is the statue of an Ashura<\/a>. Then I went to Todai-ji<\/a> temple (also visited here five years ago), the biggest wooding building in the world and still very impressive to me.<\/p>\n

After sightseeing in Nara, I picked up my bag and took a train to Kyoto. An interesting note is the parking structures at train stations. I saw a three level parking structure, but it held spots for cars. All for motorcycles and bicycles. I remember China was famous for bicycles, but I think not anymore. Japan is more serious.<\/p>\n

In Kyoto, I walked around Nishikujo Toriiguchicho shopping mall. There was one store where kids were playing card battles. Another store with N scale model railroad<\/a> products; so small but looks like the standard here. I also found two buffet restaurants. One was $23 and the other had one price for men ($21) and women ($20). Too bad the food\u00c2\u00a0didn’t\u00c2\u00a0look too great. No sushi or anything special. The buffet also has a time limit of 90 minutes. I was interested to see the Yoshoku<\/a> or western style food. This is very common in Japan, but almost never found in Japanese restaurants outside of the country. I decided to try omurice<\/a>, an omelet filled with fried rice. It tasted fine, but it was $6 for something that seemed so simple.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m convinced Kyoto Station<\/a> is the strangest train station in the world. I spent hours walking around the station waiting for my bus later that night. At 15-stories tall, this building has a hotel, shopping malls, a skywalk, public roof areas, escalators and dark hallways that seemingly go nowhere important. What it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have is a waiting area with seats.<\/p>\n

I had a bus scheduled at 10:30PM from Kyoto Station to Tokyo. At $50 for an eight hour bus, this was the cheapest way of getting to Tokyo short of hitchhiking. The bus companies had no physical office. I had bought the ticket online and wrote down my reservation number. At night, some employees setup a temporary table outside and checked in passengers. Most of the passengers turned out to be foreigners. All the\u00c2\u00a0foreigners\u00c2\u00a0kept talking and talking. Finally, a bus employee told them to be quiet since this is a night bus and people are trying to sleep. A reminder of how polite Japanese are in comparison to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leaving Osaka, I took the Kintetsu Nara Line eastwards to Yamatosaidaiji station. This station had a lot of choices for Japanese food inside. I chose the cheapest plate of curry rice for $5. I put $3.75 in a coin operated locker to keep my heavy bag while I looked around the ancient capital of Nara. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Japan 2012 (Nara and Kyoto)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":562,"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matero.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}