We left Kanazawa this morning and hopped aboard our Japan Rail Thunderbird Limited Express bound for Kyoto. Two hours later we arrived at Kyoto Station where the Hyatt Regency met us with a driver thanks to Lauren. Moments later we were at the hotel checking in.
The property is quite nice but has almost no suites. As a result Hyatt does not upgrade at this property and so we are in a standard room. The forecast says rain this weekend, so we made a snap decision to just dump our bags and go right back to the station and jump on another train, this time for Nara.
Nara was on our list of things to see and do this weekend in Kyoto, it’s just a little out of the way with a 35-45 minute train ride to get there. It just seemed like this afternoon was good timing to do this trip, so we did.
45 minutes later we were in Nara. Unfortunately rather than walking to the park we made a mistake and got on a bus that took us for a tour of Nara the town. Mid way through we jumped off the bus and grabbed a cab to get to Nara Park.
Why so fired up to get to Nara Park, you ask? The deer, of course. The entire park is home to a herd of tame deer that have been deemed divine and so live in the park unmolested. If you’re a deer, this is where you want to live.
As you enter the park there is this sweet little lady who sells deer biscuits for ¥150. So immediately your brain goes to a place where you think HOW FUN it would be to feed a tame deer. What you don’t realize is that deer are ready for you, watching you, in fact they’ve been sizing you up since you walked in the park and now that you’ve reached into your pocket for the money they know that the biscuits are about to follow.
So they rush you.
And before you know it, you’ve been surrounded and realize that you might be lunch so you start to run for it as they nip at your heels.
Then it all comes together in your brain and realize that you’ve been marked by the deer as a sucker and it would have been better to buy and hide the biscuits and calmly walk away from the lady until you found a single deer in a quite corner to feed.
Here’s the fun part: they will bow to you for their biscuits. If you bow, they will bow back. Bow again and they’ll bow some more. And they’ll keep bowing until they get their damn biscuit!
Deer at Nara Park from Alex Allpublic on Vimeo.
So we were a little obsessed with deer even though they’d walk by you and do things like grab your shirt and pull or bite your ass to make you turn around. Crafty little devils.
It was just so hard to stay mad at them for long though — and they count on that cuteness to suck you right back into buying more biscuits and feeding them again. They know exactly how to get more when they want them — they’ll even escort you right up to the counter to buy them.
We loved the deer at Nara Park!
