Because we apparently didn’t get enough castles, temples or shrines over the previous two days in Kyoto - we headed off to Nara.
Nara is famous for a couple of things, including the deer.
They’re little (about waist high), they’re everywhere, and they want food. There’s many, many street vendors selling deer biscuits, and kids on their school trips spend most of their excursion time leading the deer around with the biscuits. The deer also make this very strange… noise. I don’t really know how to describe it (grunting? wailing?), but Yukari (former student that we visited in Nagoya) does a very good impression of it.
Nara is also famous for Tōdai-ji, a large temple which houses an equally large Buddha.
Nara is much like Kyoto, in that there are shrines and temples everywhere, but it also has some very nice gardens that Mom insisted we go to. To be honest, they were really beautiful - even though we were right in the middle of the city, the gardens were landscaped so that you couldn’t see the surrounding buildings, but instead only saw the mountains circling Nara.
Unfortunately for Dad, Mom has decided she really likes the Japanese ponds, especially the stone bridges. 
But I think it’s mostly the attention to detail that appeals to Mom - like how they cover up the water pipes and filters.
Of course, following the gardens, there were still more temples to see, including Sangatsu-do and Nigatsu-do. Since Nara is surrounded by mountains, there were lots of stairs to be had (notice Remi and Andrew trudging up them - I’m not entirely sure what Dad is doing).
And, since it is a shrine - you have to wash your hands. But only if you’re not Pac-Man.
We were quite tired on our way back to Kyoto for the night (Nara is quite close, so we just did a day-trip), so I failed to notice this sign.
Fortunately, Remi and Andrew did notice it, so Dad was the only one who got on the pink women-only car. Oops!
For dinner, we went to our favourite style of restaurant - the Japanese pub! This particular izakaya served even more types of meat-on-a-stick than usual, so of course Remi had to order the sparrow. Yep, there are two sparrows on that stick.
Of course, I managed to get the skull. Ugh - I don’t reccommend sparrow skull.
However, I do reccommend lots and lots of chu hai to wash it down!
And, you can’t go wrong with individually wrapped sausages.
Hot dogs from a vending machine (in the train station) aren’t that horrible either.
