Todai-ji, Nara, Japan

Nara, Japan. Home of one of Japan's largest temples—Todaiji—and likely one of the largest sitting Buddhas in the nation. Countless deer roam the city. They eat crackers from your hand or nip at your fingers or other areas on your body they suspect are hiding food. The authorities have wisdom to put up signs that warn visitors of how deer might assault you. Yet despite this knowledge, the powers-that-be operate vending machines of deer crackers for tourists to find ways to endanger themselves.

We tasted fresh sake from a maker here and observed the dangerous practice of hammering out mochi dough to make the delicious dessert. It involves a large carnival-like wooden hammer and a quick-handed assistant to flip the lump of dough and move his hands out of the way of the next hammer-fall, which follows quickly. After that violent processsing of the matcha tea infused glutinous rice flour mix comes the delicate shaping of the mochi into identically sized bite-sized morsels that words cannot even approach hoping to describe.

Nara is located south of Kyoto and east of Ōsaka. Day 1 was landing in Ōsaka, where we took two nights in a nice hotel. After meeting up with our travel companions we set out to our AirBnB in Kyoto, which we'd use as a launchpad to explore Kyoto environs, Nara, Fushimi Inari, and Arashiyama.