May 7, 2008 - Nara, Japan

First thing this morning, we boarded bus at Kansai Airport and headed to Nara. The trip was about an hour and a half long. Everything runs exactly ontime in Japan. If they say that the bus leaves at 8:40am, the bus is pulling away from the curb at 8:40am.

We got to see some impressive driving as the bus went through the toll gate arms. The arms rise about a second before the speeding bus goes through. JC was just kicking back and relaxing with a Japanese Soda.

The trip to Nara allowed us to see some of the country side. There are some impressive cranes on the ocean. The biggest one that we saw was about half way between Kansai Airport and Nara. Here it is!

Driving ranges are very popular. They are all enclosed in huge green nets. Many of them have greens out in the water for you to hit at. I was unable to get a picture of the driving ranges because we were driving by them just too quickly.

By popular request here are a couple of pictures of Thomas. He actually made it to Japan with the rest of us.

Once in Nara, we dropped our bags at the hotel and took off on a walking tour of the city. This city is really amazing! However, I don’t think that some of the pictures will do it justice, but I will insert them anyway (so you can print them in color).

The statues in these temples are just massive. It is tough to get a sense of scale on these statues, but check out JC looking at these statues. They are huge!!

We visited some different temples he in Nara. They were over 1,000 years old and the craftsmanship is just incredible. Carl did his best to act as tour guide as he has been here before. He took us all over the city and we managed to never get lost. This is a lot more impressive that it sounds because we could only read about 50% or less of the signs.

We did see some rickshaws, but we did not get to ride in them yet. Maybe this will happen later in the week. Here is a picture of the rickshaw. These drivers have to be in some serious shape to negotiate the hilly streets of Nara.

Parking is at a premium here in Nara (and all over Japan). You can see this in this photo. The cars and trucks here are just tiny. Even the garbage trucks and concrete trucks are just half the size of trucks in the United States! My car would be huge over here!

Nara has some awesome parks. We walked all though them throughout the day. Here is a picture of the parks.

Nara has thousands of tiny deer that just hang out in the parks and temple areas. Carl and JC got friendly with this “Big” Buck! People buy these small cookies and feed the deer all over the place. The deer just follow you and see if you have anything to give them to eat.

There were groups of school children touring all over Nara. They are very well behaved and many of them are wearing matching uniforms. For those of you that think that the “Fro” is not a Japanese hair style, I have proof that the “Fro” is alive and well here in Nara.

Here is a picture of a Japanese Fire Hydrant. It is very similar to ours, but as with most things over here it is a little bit smaller.

Here are some other pictures from today.


We head to WFT to check out the Reactor internals tomorrow. We will not be allowed to take pictures in their shop, so I will not be able to show you the internals.