The entrance to Fushimi Inari Shrine.
Inari is the Shinto deity of agriculture, and is associated with foxes (I think they are his/her messengers.), so the entire shrine is filled with fox statues like this one:
But what Fushimi Inari is most famous for is its torii: those orange gates. The shrine has hundreds of them that run all over the mountainside, beginning here:
Sometimes they're spaced so close together the sun can barely get through:
At the end of the first set of tunnels, there's a place in the shrine where people can write their prayers on fox-shaped blocks of wood and draw their own little faces on them (for 500 yen).
And then there are more torii gates:
Which lead to another part of the shrine.
We stopped for tea and inarizushi (special kind of sushi with tofu) around here, because we'd basically been hiking up a mountain through torii gates and needed a break.
And the gates kept going.
And going.
And going...
And you get the idea. Eventually we extracted ourselves, had lunch, and then got back on the train and went all the way to Nara.
An afternoon is nowhere near enough time to do everything there is to do in Nara. Our main priority was to see the Daibutsu: a large Buddha statue, but we were quickly distracted, because on the way to the Daibutsu is Nara Park and its deer.
Here is a picture of the deer:
Now, in the opposite of what I've been told by park rangers and parents my entire life, you're supposed to feed the Nara deer. You can buy packets of rice crackers for 150 yen. I did. This is the result:
I was...rather excited. As you can see, the Nara deer bow quite politely for their food. Which is the only polite thing about them. They're not exactly shy.
Once my rice crackers were all eaten, it was on to the Daibutsu.
The entrance:
The outside of Todaiji Temple, which houses the Daibutsu:
And a picture of the Daibutsu itself, which is not only pitifully blurry because of the poor lighting inside the temple, but also makes it look really small, when in actuality it is enormous.
And I managed to get the backs of people's heads in the picture too. Unfortunately this is the best shot I got. Sorry.
And that's day 3. If I had to pick my favorite day, this would be it.
