Nara

For a day trip to Nara we teamed up with a young Canadian, Mark. He volunteered to do the travel research, but despite his extreme confidence in his ability to be the guide, we arrived an hour late and a little disgruntled.
During the eighth century, the first permanent capital for the Imperial court was at Nara. The old rectangular designed city, based on the Chinese model, was allowed to decay after the capital was moved away.
The temples, palaces and castles of Japan are mostly made of wood and thus difficult to preserve. Many have been totally rebuilt. As Nara had been neglected for centuries, it is now only a shadow of its former grandeur. However, the the temples and shrines that remain bear witness to the strength of the Buddhist sects that thrived there. These are enhanced by being situated in a large park with roaming deer who have been immortalised in statue.
At the Kasuga Shrine with the many stone lanterns leading up to it, I gave way to temptation and bought a prediction of my future fortune, which was based on my having been born in the year of the bull. This was supplied by a "holy maiden", whose interpretation of my fortune was not too promising. To counteract this, she convinced me to buy a lucky charm whose tingling bells would bring me good luck by calling on Budha each time they were rung. Unfortunately the charm is now bringing good fortune to a quick fingered Bolshevik in Leningrad.
At the Todaiji Temple, we stood in awe at the Great Buddha, the biggest bronze Buddha in the world. The statue took fourteen years to complete, is fifty-three feet high and sits on a base sixty-eight feet in diameter. It is enclosed in a wooden, temple pavilion also said to be the biggest in the world.
At Nara, I saw my only pagoda in Japan, unlike China where they were everywhere. This was a wooden replacement for an earlier golden model.
After hours of sightseeing and disrupting many school parties we headed back to the arms of Mrs Uno. On the subject of the tremendous popularity of Europeans to young school children, we found it fatal to give in to their demands for autographs. We saw a small, middle-aged European woman give into these demands inside the Todaiji Temple. I moved forward to warn her but she sealed her fate by squatting down to write better. 'For God's sake keep above them!' But it was too late and she disappeared under a sea of children waving their autograph books at where she had stood ony a moment before.