Nara! Deer! Park!

Alright lets get to speed on this... So January 2nd I took a midnight overnight bus to Osaka. That's how I ended up in Osaka. I got there at around 6:30am and wasn't able to check into my airbnb until 3pm (awful timing). So I walked around in the rain lost for an hour until I finally found McDonalds (low key the best place on the planet let me get to that) and then I literally slept in the McDonalds until noon when I was able to drop my bag off at the Airbnb but cleaning wasn't done until 3.

The reason McDonald's is the best place on earth is that it has free wifi, food, clean (enough) bathrooms, and no one will ever bother you for sleeping in a McDonalds (outside of the US). You see outside of the USA McDonald's are huge. You have limited space on the first floor so they only (usually) have the ordering counter on ground floor, then you go up or down or both and find these massive dining rooms that are pretty much unmonitored because you can't really steal from them and I'm talking like 50-200 seats depending on the size of the place you're in. So I hunkered down in the corner of this one (part of the train station so a big one) and I was one of FIVE people sleeping in the McDonalds that morning. By noon there were only two of us left but it was nice having some friends for solidarity.

I then legged it over to my Airbnb and was wrong in thinking I could chill during cleaning so I had to go find somewhere else to be for three hours and ended up in that over priced coffee place (where sadly I couldn't sleep)

Well up to this point in Japan I literally hadn't had any privacy. I was literally never alone. My hostel I was in 8 bed dorms and other than that I was in public so it was amazing to just have a place to myself to a few days. I also got a bit sick from the bus and hour in the rain so I just chilled for like 2 days straight and did nothing but eat, hibernate, and watch Prison Break which is a 2005 tv show that I highly recommend.

Anyway finally on the 4th day I managed to get out and head over to Nara where I met my friend Bella (Aussie I met in Tokyo) and we spent the day there together. Nara park is a place known for its history, shrines, temples, and nearly 1500 tame (ish) deer that roam the park.

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Japanese deer or at least Nara deer are smaller than what we have in Oregon and have a decidedly cuter and rounder face. I don't know the origin of how this came to be but you can buy deer cookies for like $1.50 and feed the deer which are more or less super tame. They are still wild animals though and will head butt you, bite or try to eat your clothes, bite your phone, tried to eat Bella's headphones, eat paper, go through your bag, etc. They're MUCH better than monkeys though and I think I would mainly attribute that to the fact that they don't have thumbs...The deer were sooooo cute until they got annoying and aggressive haha and ate Bella's earphones which I thought was funny and obviously she did not.

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I think they're really cute though and I got a bunch of really good selfies with them haha

The other things we saw in Nara were the temples and shrines. These were amazing and humongous and really beautiful. Plus they all had the deer roaming around and that gave it an older feeling and a sense of beauty in my mind.

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I'm not even going to lie though I'm starting to get sick of temples here in Japan. I mean these were amazing but... I think I'm over temples faster in Japan than Thailand because I'm still low key over temples in general because of Thailand. Oh well, these were massive structures and still beautiful.

I'm rather proud of this photo though so I'll post it separately haha. The next photo is walking over the bridge in Osaka just by my Airbnb. Really beautiful and a peaceful area but walking distance from everything important.

I am also going to add that the train from Osaka to Nara only cost me $5 each way so that was awesome. Additionally I walked a whopping 26,000 steps today partly because I also got lost in Namba Station (yes it's that huge) finding my friend Paige who showed up this night to hang out for a few days on her way home.

Seriously some of the train stations in Japan are like malls (or have malls in them) and are blocks and blocks long with connections on every side. Many are multi level and can be super confusing. They are so big that they have areas. Tokyo station in Tokyo and Shibuya are pretty big and Shinjuku is so large and confusing it's called the "Tourist Killer" and there's even a satirical article about a tourist who gets lost for like 7 years (did I tell you about that already?)

Anyway Namba connects to a building above, is probably several blocks in size in many directions, has area's like Namba Central, Namba Parks, Namba CITY, etc. Yeah its really huge... Anyway I got really lost because Paige swore she was underground but was actually on the second floor up...