As you can see by this bloated deer, the tourists are back! I was reading that during COVID, the deer were starving without the daily influx of tourists feeding the deer rice cookies. By the time we arrived in the afternoon, the deer looked like they were full and tired of having tourists stick cookies in their faces. We had to walk away from the central park area up to Wakakusayama Hill to find deer that were eager to crunch the cookies.
This is the fourth time that I’ve visited Nara Park and the famous Sika or Northern Spotted or Japanese Deer (Cervus nippon). My daughter Ocean wanted to post photographs of feeding the deer on her Instagram so we drove from Osaka to Nara (55 minutes). Besides the deer, there are some beautiful Buddhist Temples including one of the world’s largest wooden temples housing a huge statue of Buddha. The manicured grounds are full of trees, ponds, and open grass areas.
The deer are considered to be sacred messengers of the gods and have been protected for over a thousand years. They have been isolated for so long from other deer herds in Japan that they are genetically different and they behave differently. The Nara Deer are famous for bowing while approaching tourists for rice. This is not a behavior Sika Deer exhibits in nature and they think it may have developed as a form of communication between the deer and the humans.
In the evening, Nadia and I rode our bicycles to meet with my friend Kurt at the Minoh Brewery. They make in my opinion, the world’s finest craft beers. I tried the Yuzu White one of their winter beers. I love seasonal things and like all of their beers, absolutely delicious. I don’t drink a lot of beer or alcohol in general for health reasons especially now I am in my 50s, but I do love an occasional good craft beer. I also keep being impressed with Google Translate. It is so much faster and more accurate than 5 years ago and makes travel in Japan easier. I also sense the Japanese are opening to the English-speaking world. With such a weak yen, the island is receiving many more tourists who are coming specifically for shopping.
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