A New Kind of Adventure in Newport, Oregon

My general kind of adventure is, as many of you know, traveling to new and different places, learning about new cultures and expanding my perspective.  I’m currently trying out a new type of adventure, one on which I very rarely embark.

I’m staying in the United States for a while, and trying out the serious relationship thing.

I know this isn’t that kind of blog and I don’t particularly want to go into details, so I won’t bore you by talking about him.  However, we recently took a weekend trip together within the US, and because that still constitutes traveling (albeit, in a very short burst), I thought I’d write about it.  After all, the majority of my traveling for the foreseeable future will be within the United States of America.

For my birthday this year, he took me a few hours southwest of our hometown to Newport, Oregon, a nice beach town, for a relaxing weekend away.

I did the majority of the research for the trip, because I’m a nerd who loves travel research way more than any person should.  I generally like Trip Advisor because its mostly user generated information and has pretty accurate information about the quality of different sights.  I only made one small mistake in my research for this particular trip.

I was looking at Newport, Rhode Island.  If you want to go there, hit me up, because I know a couple cool things to do there.

I only realized I’d done that when we got there, but it was fine because Newport, Oregon has a couple of great things to do as well.  On our way down we stopped at the Devil’s Punchbowl, which is a large sea cave whose roof partially collapsed, leaving a large circular hole that looks down onto the sea floor, where the waves crash into the walls of the cave and the rocks along the shore.  It was beautiful, but a pretty quick stop.  Then we kept driving down toward Newport.  When we arrived we mostly just hung out, and went to the Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area.  After an appropriate amount of time spent mocking the name, we headed into the area and saw its main attraction: the lighthouse.  It was closed, so we couldn’t climb up to its top, but a nearby hill provided a good viewpoint of the lighthouse and the edge of the coastline.  A small pod of whales were hanging out nearby, and we spotted a few coming up for air, spouting and showing their backs on the way up and their tails on the way down.

We looked over the map we’d been given at the entrance, and found that there were a few spots that had some good tide pools.  We planned to get up early and come back the next morning.  We went on another hike through the area, down to the spot where some of the tide pools would be exposed at low tide in the morning.  There wasn’t much to see when the tide was high, but it could be cool tomorrow morning.

The rest of the night was very relaxed.  We just went swimming at our hotel and used the sauna, which was nice.  Then we headed out for dinner at The Chowder Bowl down on Nye beach.  We shared the clam chowder, calamari, and marionberry cobbler, and every bite was delicious.  We watched a movie in our hotel room and went to bed early so that we could get up early for the tidepools.

We left the hotel at around seven in the morning in order to get to the tide pools during the lowest part of the tide.  The tide pools in the Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area were really cool, even though there was a large group of middle school students there on a field trip.  We climbed all over the rocks, trying to avoid stepping on anything living.  We saw anemones, starfish, and a large amount of other really cool sea life.  The starfish were particularly surprising because a disease had recently wiped out the vast majority of the starfish all along the west coast.  But we were lucky and there were still a few to see.

After that, we were tired because it was so early, so we took a nap.

The afternoon was spent at the Aquarium, always conscious of the time so we wouldn’t miss high tide in the afternoon, which is the best time to see Devil’s Churn, Thor’s Well, Spouting Horn, and Cook’s Chasm.  The Newport Aquarium is pretty cool, and we had a lot of fun, again in spite of the group of high school children there on a field trip.  They have great interactive tide pools there where you can touch the starfish and anemones, which are a weird combination of wet, sticky, and smooth.  The jellyfish were my favorite part, as they always are at any aquarium. They just look so cool.  The octopus and giant crabs were pretty cool as well.

We headed to Devil’s Churn first, since it was the northernmost spot.  The churn is a spot in the coastline that was weakened by strong waves, resulting in a long, thin inlet that endures a constant barrage of waves against its walls.  You can walk right down to the edge of the rocks, where the water crashes against the sides just a few feet below you.  I’d been there before, but he hadn’t, so we stayed a little while to explore.

From there we headed a little further south past Yachats (pronounced Ya-hots because English is stupid) to Cook’s Chasm.  Captain James Cook discovered much of the Oregon Coast, including this particular chasm, which look much like a larger version of the Devil’s Churn.  Cook’s Chasm, however, has two really cool sights among its rocks.  First, right at the edge where the open ocean meets the rocks, there is Thor’s Well, a hole in the rocks that seems bottomless, but fills with water from below each time the waves hit the shore.  The water bubbles up from below and cascades over the sides, emptying itself partially over its own borders and partially in the hole below sight, where it is fed by the waves.

Again, you can walk right up to the edge of the well, but it can be dangerous at high tide.  Luckily, there are some slightly raised rocks nearby that look down on the well, but are too high to be affected by the incoming water.  It was pretty cool.

On the other side, along the chasm’s edge, was Spouting Horn.  As the waves crashed up against a small underwater cave, water was forced up toward the ceiling of the cave, which had a small hole.  Mist burst up through the hole with each large wave, spitting water high into the air seemingly in imitation of a spouting whale.  It was pretty cool, and the mist shot pretty high, although getting pictures was pretty difficult.

At the end we stopped for dinner in Newport along the boardwalk, at the original Moe’s.  We decided to mix it up this time, and so we shared the clam chowder, the calamari, and the marionberry cobbler.

We’re so cool.

Bali Temples, Bali Dances, Bali Bali

I got to Incheon Airport super early and THANK GOD I did because my flight was delayed so I would miss my connection.  They put me on an earlier flight, which seemed a bit like fate.  Waiting for the transfer bus in Shanghai it was just one other guy from my Seoul flight and me.  We got to talking and found out we lived three subway stops apart in Korea.  Then he told me he was from Oregon, Portland, Jesuit!  His dad works with Mike.  Crazy coincidences.

We were also sitting together on the flight to Bali, so we decided to just travel together for the first few days, until I moved to a new city or his girlfriend arrived from Korea.  We had bunk beds in a very run down hostel our first night and then moved on to a nicer hotel (same price- gotta love SE Asia) the next morning.   Got burned with some unfortunate tan lines, but whatever.  We met a German guy named Mario on the beach and ended up hanging out with him.  He was forty-two, but looked in his mid-thirties with longish hair.  He was a happy-go-lucky, slightly strange guy but he was fun.  That night we went to all you can eat tacos and enchiladas ($4) and then free drinks until 11.  I got pretty drunk, spoke Spanish with some cute Chileans, met an Irish guy named Paddy because of course he was, sliced my foot open demonstrating a proper pitch when someone made fun of softball, danced on a bar, and still went home pretty early.

Wednesday I kind of regret because I wasted it feeling like terrible from lack of sleep.  I went to the beach alone, but couldn’t leave the shade due to a headache and the previous day’s burn.  Brian (from the flight) was booking stuff for his girlfriend’s arrival.  I went back to the hotel and took a short nap.  After, I felt better so I went to find Brian on the beach.  He was with Mario, who he’d run into.  We hung out a bit, then went back to the same buffet for wings night.  Then we went out again to the same free drinks place.  We met another solo traveler who was cool.  His name was Tice and he was Dutch.  He was tall, skinny, awkward, but nice once you got past that.  We all shared a hookah and watched Mario crawl around on the floor trying to get a closer look at a prostitute’s shoes.  Honestly.

Thursday I got up early and packed up, booked a bus to Ubud and took off with a few nineteen year old British girls (Natalie, nice brunette, gave in to traveler chic, Georgie, tan, blonde, quiet, Abby, blonde wanna-be fashionista type, sunburned, and Jo who was super obnoxious “I quit that job.  A the end of the day I was so tired of riding their horses that I didn’t even want to ride my own horse.” Shut up, Jo). 

We went to the Sacred Monkey Temple when we got there, after finding a nice hotel.   The monkeys kept trying to hide in and climb up my long, white skirt.  Then we did nothing until around seven when we ventured out in the rain to get dinner.  The weather had been beautiful up until then.

Friday was the busiest day of the trip so far.  I got up early to finish planning and then hired a taxi to take me around a bit.  For $15 he took me around for 2.5 hours, to Goa Gajah (the elephant cave) and Gunung Kawi (the rocky temple).  Goa Gajah was cool, but OH MY GOD Gunung Kawi was incredible.  Goa Gajah has lots of little waterfalls and holy water fountains.  There was the small cave with Buddhist carvings inside.  There was a waterfall down some stairs that had huge, carved stones in its pool, the remnants of ancient pillars.  That was about it.  Gunung Kawi was down a ton of steps, but partway down the venders stopped, the jungle opened up, and spectacular rice terraces were right there in front of me.  I saw the one on the left first, just above the river, which was rushing at the bottom of the hill.  There were palm trees along the edge of the terrace, and at the bottom, around the river, it gave way to pure jungle.  I wasn’t expecting that view at all, so I unthinkingly said “Holy fucking shit.”  An old Balinese woman nearby making handicrafts chuckled, stood up next to me looking down and said, “Yes.  Holy fucking shit.”  Then I laughed and we shook or awkwardly held hands for a moment before I moved on.  To the right the terraces were more extensive and organized because the hill didn’t give way as sharply.  Still beautiful but in a more obviously artificial way.  I continued down the hill to the bottom, where I crossed a bridge that went over a river.  It said entrance to the right, but a lot of it was under construction.  When I got through the stone structures (some carved right out of the hillside).  I came to a huge stone wall that came right out of the hillside, with carvings in the middle.  It was stunning.  There was another across the river, just to the right of the path I’d been walking down, at the base of the rice terraces.  The walk back up sucked a little bit, but it was still worth it.  I went back to Ubud and got lunch.  It was some delicious spicy-ish chicken, tasty yellow rice, and traditional green vegetables.  Very yummy.  Then I went back to the hotel, changed, and headed out to the Campuhan Ridge Walk (2 km through hills of lush jungle with a steep drop on each side leading down to two rivers).  Then on to the Saraswati temple, a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess of literature, art, and learning.  Two beautiful lily pad covered ponds with a path between them lead up to the temple.  Inside the temple there were a lot of beautiful plants and old grey temple structures, with statues sprinkled in here and there.  It was very quiet, peaceful, and beautiful considering it was in the middle of the city, right next to Starbucks.

That night I went to the Ubud palace to watch a performance of traditional Balinese dance.  There were three dances: the Legong Kraton dance, the Bapang dance, and  the Telek.

The Legong Kraton dance is performed by three women in bright, colorful costumes.  It is about an arrogant kid who wants a princess who has no interest in him.  He plans to slay her father so that he can be with her, but ends up dying in battle instead.

The Bapang dance is an overture to the Telek.  It consists of a monster called the Barong, who is controlled by two different men.  The Barong looked a bit like a very fluffy, hairy dog who had bred with a dragon.  There was another dancer dressed as a monkey, who teased the Barong with a banana.

Then came the final Barong dance, called the Telek.  It started with a dance between virtue and vice, represented by dancer wearing beautiful masks and others wearing ugly masks.  They leave a four women enter, students who study under a witch and are performing a strange magic rite.  They are chased away by the king’s spiritual leader, a white magic guru.  The guru asks the witch to stop doing evil magic, but she refuses.  They fight to see whose magic is stronger and he wins.  Enraged, she turns herself into a monster.  To fight her once more, the guru changes himself into Barong, the dog dragon creature from the Bapang dance.  Her evil power is gone, and it goes into the villagers who were helping Barong.  They feel the evil and kill themselves rather than give in.  Their lives are restored.

The dance itself was bright and beautiful, and a welcome respite from the pouring rain that seems to come every night in Ubud.  The women were all very beautiful, and the dancers’ movements were very precise and elegant.  Their hands and fingers bent in ways I hadn’t realized were possible without force.  All in all, I was very glad I went, even if I did have to walk home barefoot (having ripped open four gaping blisters per foot during the course of the day’s activities) through puddles up to my ankles while the rain continued to pour.  That’s what adventure is all about- not knowing what will happen next and rolling with the punches, so to speak.

Saturday I woke up at two in the morning and got on a van.  We picked up some other people at another hotel.  Then we went to a small parking lot and sat on a platform.  Another van pulled up and the two drivers made us breakfast and gave us tea and coffee.  They made banana pancakes and gave us mango.  Then we continued on, with me in the other van so that we were split four people in each.  We drove to a volcano toward the north of the island.  At around three-thirty the two Finnish girls from my van and I started to climb.

It wasn’t the hardest hike I’ve ever done, but it was far from the easiest.  Some parts required both hands and legs to pull and push yourself up to the next platform, and the ground was covered in scree the entire way up, making it difficult to keep your footing.  The point of going so early was to reach the top before sunrise, which I managed to do in spite of the fact that it was pouring rain once again and there was a thunderstorm over the top of the lake at the base of the volcano.  We reached the top, waiting twenty minutes for the sunrise.  Unfortunately, the cloud cover never dispersed and the sunrise was completely obscured.  We climbed back down quickly, though the Norwegians who ran straight down the side of the mountain, completely forgoing the path, go to the bottom much faster than we did.

After a short nap, I returned to the street outside and found another taxi driver to take me to the Western side of the island.  I went to the water palace, called Tirta Gangga, which was a beautiful garden filled with ponds and fountains.  It was drizzling slightly, but it was still gorgeous.  There were small creeks from one pond to another, with dragon bridges that spanned the barely moving water.  One of the ponds, right next to the largest fountain, had stone steps throughout so you could walk on the water to get closer to the fountain.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a rice terrace on the side of the road and ate lunch.  My driver was really nice and he spoke great English.  He bought me some soup at a roadside hut.  It was a kind of soup that I used to eat in Thailand sometimes, with fish cakes, dumplings, chicken, and sprouts in a super tasty broth.  I never knew what it was called in Thailand, and he didn’t tell me there either.  He also bought me some crackers and jackfruit.  Don’t feel too bad for the driver paying for my meal- for both of us to eat only cost him $1.  It’s hard to hate those Southeast Asian prices.

That afternoon I took the last bus back to Kuta beach, the main tourist beach where I had started my vacation.  I went back to the same hotel and went to the same dinner.  Then I went down to the beach and tried to catch the sunset, but it was a little bit overcast (story of my trip).  One the way back I saw a Damian Lillard jersey and bought it for $20, which is considerably more reasonable than the $80 it costs in the states.

The next day I had a while to hang out because my flight wasn’t until that night at midnight.  I packed up and left all my stuff at the concierge, then went to find a motorcycle taxi.  I found a guy just outside my hotel, and he drove me down the coast to Uluwatu temple, which was a Buddhist temple on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.  It was absolutely gorgeous, but all the stairs kind of killed my quads after yesterday’s volcano climb.  On the way back to Kuta, he stopped at three different surfer beaches.  One was so steep that the beach was invisible.  There were little restaurants all down the hill so I ate lunch and watched surfers tackling the huge waves below.  Then we stopped at another beach where I laid out for a short while and read.

My motorcycle driver was a young guy, and he loved to talk about all sorts of things.  He talked the entire time he drove, and sat and talked to me at all the stops, too.   He was talking about music and told me how much he loved Snoop Dog.  I asked if he had ever been to a concert, and he said that Snoop was coming the following week, but tickets were too expensive.  I asked him how much, and he said even the worst seats were at least $200.  Seriously Snoop?  You’re going to come to a developing nation where the majority of the population has little to no disposable income and charge those kinds of prices?  Be realistic.

That night I sat out at the hotel and hung out with a few of the other guests, drinking beer while it poured down rain.  I was waiting for my van to the airport, and they were just starting the night out easy, planning to go out to bars and clubs after I left. 

The flight back to Korea was easy, and all I did the next day was close my bank account and pick up my cat.  And now, back to the states!  Goodbye, Asia, it’s been real.  Stay sweet.

Four Days in Japan (an extremely detailed account)

A few months ago I realized that I had a four day weekend coming for one of Korea’s biggest holidays: Chuseok.  It’s kind of like Korean Thanksgiving, where family gathers together and games are played, special treats are eaten, and thanks are given.  Sitting at my desk, trying to prep for the day, I decided that I didn’t want to stay in Korea for it.  So I pulled up a Chrome window on my computer, neglecting my reports, and looked for a plane ticket to Osaka.  Twenty minutes later I was two minutes late for class but with a plane ticket in my inbox.

I somehow forgot to mention to most people that I was going, except for a few coworkers who I knew had recently travelled there.  I decided not to spend any time in Osaka, but rather to take a train to Kyoto and tour around to a few of the cooler temples in the area, take a day trip to Hiroshima and another to Nara, and just generally do whatever struck my fancy on a particular day.  By the time Chuseok weekend rolled around (two weekends ago), I had discovered that a good friend and former coworker was likewise headed to Kyoto for a few days.  Everything was going well.

And then the security line was insanely long at Incheon on the way to Japan, made infinitely longer by the racist middle-aged Frenchman who’d decided I was his best friend.  I tried to keep the conversation light and humorous, mentioning Supernatural’s ideation of hell as infinitely waiting in lines, politely declining to point out that Jean Paul Sartre’s iteration of hell was other people.  The trip didn’t seem to be going quite so well after all.

However, I made it away from the Frenchman and through security without incident, and a few short hours later I was in Japan, jumping on a train from Osaka to Kyoto.  Straight off the train, I went outside to catch a bus to my hostel, and once I found the proper place to line up, I heaved a sigh of relief and dropped my bag to the floor.  I turned around to look around, only to discover two full-blown geisha lined up behind me.  You know you’re in Japan when…

I really messed up my first day timing-wise, and didn’t get to see anything in Kyoto because the temples were all closed even though it was only four in the afternoon.  Apparently temples close at four thirty, which seems a bit on the early side.  I found myself wishing I had just left my bags at the bus station and taken off to explore, without heading to the hostel first.  You know what they say about hindsight.  On my way back to my hostel I thought I’d go a few stops further to Gion (a.k.a. historical geisha town) and see if there was anything to see.  There were: some random, amazing, bright red temple-style buildings, and scores of Geisha.  Then it started pouring, so I sat there in the rain, on the edge of a vermillion temple, trying to wait out the rain.  By the time I gave up on the idea that it would ever end and just took off, it was past dark and I was soaked.  I stopped in at an Indian restaurant that was on the way back toward my hostel and had the best garlic naan of my life, ignoring the guilt for not eating Japanese food whilst in Japan.

The next day I got up early, intending to hop a train to Hiroshima, not knowing how to get anywhere once I arrived at Hiroshima station.  When I first woke up though, I had some trouble lifting my head, which seemed to be weighted to the pillow.  I finally realized that I was not ill or exceedingly exhausted, but merely physically held down.  You see, my bed was a mat on the floor next to another mat, so close together that with blankets on top you couldn’t distinguish one from the other.  Or, you know, so close that you wake up with a random dude’s hand twisted in your hair.  I untangled myself, made my way to the train station and got on a train to the allegedly still radioactive destination of the first atom bomb.

 After jumping on a random streetcar in Hiroshima and getting off at the stop the driver told me was closest to the museum, I wandered around for a while, looking for signs of where I was going.  I finally started to see markers pointing me in the right direction, and headed off toward the museum.

The museum was moving in a lot of regards.  I’d heard that it was quite biased, but I didn’t think so.  I mean, yes, I only saw one mention of Pearl Harbor, but there wasn’t any vicious attack against the US.  From what I could tell, it was a factual, unflinching, objective as possible representation of the effects of the bomb.  Most moving stories:  A mother who forced her daughter to go to work “so she could help her country” even though her daughter had a headache.  Only part of the girl’s schoolbag was ever found.  Her mother blamed herself until her own death.  A girl who swam across a river to get home, but was so badly burned that she was only recognizable by her voice.  She died a few days later because her family didn’t have enough medicine to help her.  A mother came into the city to look for her 12 or 13 year-old son.  She found an unrecognizably charred corpse curled up around a lunchbox, which proved to be her son’s lunchbox.  The carefully prepared lunch consisting of the first harvest of his own garden, which he had been extremely excited about that morning, was completely charred inside.  The item I found most interesting was a watch, carried by a man who died, its glass face smashed, and its hands stopped at the exact moment the bomb hit. 

The other part I found most intriguing was the children’s monument.  The idea for the monument came from the classmates of one girl,  Sadako Sasaki, who got Leukemia ten years after the blast at the age of twelve.  She’d heard that if you made 1,000 paper cranes, your wish came true.  She folded 1,000 tiny cranes in the hospital.  She died anyway.  Ever wonder where those paper cranes you folded in middle/elementary schools went?  They’re here.  Maybe I folded that blue one.  Or the purple one there.  They even had some of the cranes made by the girl herself in the museum.  The truth was that there were huge numbers of children in the city at the time, particularly kids ages twelve to sixteen.  These students were used after school or during free hours as demolition teams, tearing down old houses to make fire lanes.  When the bomb hit there were thousands of them in the city, working for their country.  Almost all of them died within just a few days of the blast.

The next stop was the dome, one of the only structures to survive the blast.  Inside weeds, grasses, and flowers were taking over what was once the floor of what was once a government building.  Steel support beams for the frame of the dome were twisted but remained in what was recognizably a dome shape.  Rocks crumbled, and the floor of the second story were mere holes.  And yet, the walls, the beams, and most of the basic structure of the building endured.  It stands as a testament to what was once in the park where I walked between museums and monuments, just below where the bomb detonated.  Before, this area, now cleared for tourists, had been the bustling center of the city.  Now its entire identity was shaped by the bomb, ever building, ever stone, either left behind by the blast or put there to honor those whose lives had been forever changed, or whose voices had been forever silenced.

I sat there in the shade at the park, thinking about all the things I’d just seen, read, and heard.  The weather was beautiful; a perfect blue sky filled with the hot sun and fluffy white cotton ball clouds.  My favorite kind of weather.  I kept thinking about my Pop-Pop, my mother’s father who fought in WWII.  I couldn’t stop.  I wished he could be there, that I’d somehow brought him before he died.  He either would’ve been moved or he would’ve hated it.  I was having trouble contextualizing it, though, trying to really understand what it all meant.  Something that massively important, something that shaped the world we live in today, something that will forever be a part of the entire world’s history, is so colossal that it’s hard to really conceptualize in a mind so unaccustomed to violence and large scale mortality.  I wonder if anyone can really imagine it who wasn’t there, who hasn’t experienced something similar.

Afterward, I had a few hours left to kill before my return train, so I walked to Hiroshima palace. I was quite unimpressed.  It was basically just two buildings with a dirty courtyard in the middle, where people dressed in garish attempts at historical costume were singing and dancing to J-Pop tunes while fan girls screamed and foreigners took videos.  Annoyed more than anything else, I moved on to some nearby botanical gardens.  I saw a land crab, carp, and a few turtles, one of whom came and sat with me.  It was beautiful and relaxing.  My camera battery had died at the castle (of course) so I only had my iPhone but the camera on it is surprisingly good.  Then I found out I had missed most of the castle, so I went back.  I was still unimpressed.  The tower was somewhat interesting, but the coolest part was the ruins from the A-bomb.  There were two foundations, both with small sets of stairs leading up to the outline of rooms, a stone blueprint built and filled in with grass.  A few trees nearby had barked scorched white by the bomb, which was still noticeable even this many years later.  I researched what those ruins had been in their former life and discovered that they were the headquarters for the Empire, which had set up camp in Hiroshima during the war.  The place was absolutely decimated, though it was almost a kilometer from the center of the blast.  I hadn’t realized that Hiroshima had been such an important target to the Allies, mostly because I’d never known why.  If the Empire’s high command really operated from here, however, it makes sense as a target.

The next day I decided to go to Nara, a nearby town with some interesting temples and shrines and a large park filled with deer.  The rapid train to Nara was by far the better choice, but I took the local train to a stop called Inari.  Just outside the stop I climbed up the side of a mountain through hundreds of vermillion Torii gates, the most popular tourist destination of Kyoto.  I’d read it took thirty minutes to the mountain’s top, but forty minutes in I wasn’t there.  When the third map in a row, spaced a quarter to half a mile apart, had the self-satisfied red “You are here” sticker in the same halfway spot, I realized that either I wasn’t moving or I was in the Labyrinth, in which case I had to get out of there before David Bowie’s spandex junk mulleted me straight to the Bog of Eternal Farts.  So, after 40 minutes and 2 miles of hiking, I threw up my hands, said “Fuck this shit” and went back down.  It was still cool even if I didn’t reach the top. 

I went to Nara and went to a Buddhist temple that had three massive Buddha sculptures.  I used to live in Thailand, so you know when I say a Buddha is big, it’s pretty damn big.  I bought a few Buddhist charms there, for family and friends.  The temple was gorgeous inside and out, and within walking distance of an amazing Shinto Shrine.  The shrine supposedly was the final resting place of four Shinto gods.  It was interesting, filled with stone lanterns all the way up the walk through the woods, and metal ones all the way through the paths of the shrine itself.  Between the temple and the shrine I stopped to buy deer cookies, thinking I’d feed a few deer.  What really happened was I took the cookies from the woman selling them, took two steps away from her, and was instantly mobbed by deer who tried to bite my fingers when I couldn’t get the wrapper off the cookies fast enough.  I ripped through the package and basically just threw cookies into the wind, hoping to make a getaway.  Aside from getting my stomach bitten (hard enough to bruise), I made it out unscathed.

Having seen what I wanted to see in Nara and with time to space, I sat on a shady bench in Nara Park with a bottle of water and my Kindle.  A few deer came to check me out occasionally (one tried to abscond with my garbage bag) but mostly I was alone.  People walked along the street in front of me (about 50 feet away) or walked through the grass about 30 feet behind me, but I was alone on the benches.  All of a sudden, I heard a sound like thunder and I looked up.  At some unknown cue, all the deer in Nara Park had started sprinting toward the woods just beyond me.  They ran mostly on two paths- one just in front of me (my bench was on its edge) and at the edge of the grass just behind me.  Mothers and babies, bucks and does, all sprinting determinedly toward an invisible something that called out silently to them.  I pulled my feet up on the bench, surrounded, and watched these seemingly docile animals do something altogether organized yet wild, answering some call of nature that my domesticated human ears could no longer hear.  Girlish squeals from farther down the road toward the temple announced the impending arrival of deer too far away to be seen joining in the wild dash.  Every person on the road and in the park froze and watched these animals be just that- animal.  Conversations stopped, conversations in Japanese, Korean, Spanish, English, and French, and everyone silently watched the blatant, naked spectacle of nature.  I didn’t see a single person raise or even reach for their camera.  The sight was so sudden, so shocking from such tame creatures, that everything else was forgotten in favor of just seeing the glorious, thunderous, inexplicable flight of the deer.

That night I met up with Mayte, my friend and former coworker, and we had dinner and a few drinks.  We started with Japanese food, which was delicious but not filling, and then moved on to a pub.  The next day we headed to the Golden Pavilion, which is one of the most recognizable sights in Kyoto.  A man who wanted to show off his wealth covered the top two floors of his home with gold leaf.  It was set in a gorgeous lake with great trees and bushes, and it was beautiful. 

After that we jumped on a train and headed out to an area called Arashimaya, which had an amazing temple, a stunning bridge over a river that snaked between hills, a bamboo forest bisected by a path, and a hill whose top was covered in monkeys.  As we adventured we met a guy from California who tagged along through our sightseeing.  I had to leave early to make the train to the airport and make my flight.  Of course, being me, I mistimed it all, missed the train, missed the next airport bus, and only made it to check-in 32 minutes before my flight, despite the fact that the ticket said 50 minutes prior or no flight.  They still let me on the flight, THANK GOD, and I made it back to Korea in one piece.  All in all it was a fantastic trip.