14-9-11
We figured out the trains and headed on a day trip out to Nara. Nara is famous for having ‘wild’ deer that will pester you for crackers to eat. None of the deer bothered us and it was really cool to see them, especially the baby ones. Although I didn’t think they looked anything like Bambi.
On the train out there and old guy practiced his English with us as he was planning on heading to the states someday and had never left Japan before. He even took us to the Tourist centre.
We arrived later in the day than we planned so couldn’t do everything that as suggested in the guidebooks. First we walked past the 5 Story Pagoda, then we went to Yoshikien Garden which is free for tourists. It was a really cute little garden and we took a lot of pictures.
Next we headed for the big Naidaimon gate and the Todaiji, big Buddha temple. The Buddha temple was pretty awesome, the statue is kinda massive. We had a lot of fun snapping up pictures of the deer and the temple. I got tiny glass Buddha and deer figures here. The deer are protected as they are meant to be messengers to the Gods.
There was even a littler Buddhist saint statue where if you are hurt you are supposed to rub the statue on the spot and then yourself. I rubbed my aching feet.
After this Mingaling started to feel a bit sick, and it was probably going to get dark and start shutting down soon, so we headed back. At the train station, while trying to find the Namba Walk, we found a supermarket and started buying our dinners and snacks from here.
15-9-11
To quote Mingaling
Blob day! We blobbed 🙂 and only went out quite late in the evening to go to Family Mart for snacks – that was the only time we got dressed / left Fraser Residence that day :).
In other words, it was a pretty awesome day. Haha.
What I did today:
I took over three classes for a teacher who was away as her mother had passed away. One class of 13 year olds, I just played hangman with as I didn’t even know what to teach them. It was pretty fun, although a few kept trying to throw in long complicated words from biology class. They decided their team names would be unicorn, panda and angry birds. That game is pretty popular here.
Then I found out an English Camp I was signed up to help out with (by my aunt) was happening this weekend. One of the foreign teachers let me know that he had only found out about it yesterday evening, and the other foreign teacher hadn’t been asked yet, and so wasn’t going to do it. Oh, and by the way, they had organized the accommodation and the plan of the day, but we actually had to figure out how to fill in all the time slots, and come up with all the activities… 110 students. This is going to interesting.
At least my aunt said I was going to get paid.