Day 9 1/4/06 - Japan

Kyoto -> Nara -> Osaka -> Kyoto

Highlight

• The Kyoto Station area was a huge modern structure, with an elaborate underground shopping arcade, connections to lots of other transportations, geisha girls, acrobatics display, old Japanese tourists lining up for transport, people meeting each other. Chaos really.
• We started the journey of temple visits, I can't keep track.
• We tried the Kyoto specialty, flat pancake wrapped with all sorts of fillings, e.g. green tea, asuki.
• Off we go on the Shinkensen again, and not long after we've consumed our goodies, and watched the conductor bow each time he enters the carriage, we arrived at Nara, the deer capital of Japan.
• From the station, there is one main road leading to Nara Park. We made our way slowly along, sidetracked by the various shops along the way.
• Japanese like to tour their own country and buy lots of souvenir from the place they visit. There were hordes of tourists snapping up all manners of deer-related products. No wonder the Japs buy up big when they're in other countries!
• Lunch at a quaint little shop. We really only ate there 'cos their plastic foods looked quite good. What came out didn't really resemble the plastic though :(
• Finally we made it to Nara Park. There really are deers EVERYWHERE, probably encouraged by all the deer food (500 yen) you can buy to feed them. It was funny, the deers were in construction sites, next to shops, on the road... We had fun trying to get pics of them, and watching all the families gathered here for picnics.
• We found a 99 Yen shop, and that's gotta be better than a 100 Yen shop right? We filled up on ice-cream and all matter of snacks.
• On our way back, we stopped off at Osaka. It's like a mini Tokyo, although it's not really small at all. Things here are definitely cheaper though. There were really crowded streets filled with people wanting a feed. We wandered along with the rest of the crowd, stopping to eat at many places. We only discovered "Korea St", where EVERY SINGLE SHOP was a Korean BBQ.

Food

• Surfur egg.
• Red bean mochi cake.
• Dried cuttlefish.
• Hersheys milk chocolate.
• Mochi pancakes.
• Mens Porky.
• Green tea ice-cream cake (104).
• Rice ball with red bean (104).
• Taste testing.
• Mixed vegetable soup with noodles with black speck (650).
• Miso udon + chicken + egg on rice (730).
• Pineapple bun (120).
• Okonomiyaki (110).
• Flat pancake mochi (530).
• Dried fish.
• Street food.