A Cold, Wet Day

Sightseeing is best in the sunshine. Or at least in cloudy weather with a light drizzle now and again. But a steady rain with a cold breeze makes any outdoors event somewhat miserable, especially when you've paid money to be outside. Sadly, that's what we were hit with today once we left Kyoto.

We stopped first outside of Kyoto in Uji, famous for its green tea. We saw the Byodo-in, or the Phoenix Hall, one of the oldest wooden structures in Japan. At one time, the interior of the building was painted brightly and gold-leafed, but now that has all faded. There's an associated museum that shows restored panels of the walls and all the gilded Buddha statues that were in the hall. You can't actually go in the building (a theme here in Japan), so we weren't able to see the main Buddha in the hall. At any rate, the museum is an amazing work of contemporary architecture, so we were maybe a little more enchanted with the museum itself than the artifacts...

Byodo-in Hall... you can almost see the two phoenixes on the roof of the main building which give it its name. Imagine that this building was painted vermilion and white and the interior spaces were all blue, orange, and greens.

This is the new museum addition... I couldn't quite get a good picture of the whole building, but it was really well done.

Then we headed to Nara to see the Great Buddha Hall (the complex is known as Todaiji). This has got to be one of the coolest buildings/sites I've ever seen. It was pouring rain, and it was still awesome. The Great Buddha Hall is an enormous, one room, Chinese-influenced building. The current building dates from the 1300s and was rebuilt from an earlier building that burned. As huge as it is, it's only 2/3 as big as the original building on the site. And the buddha inside is really amazing. He's huge! Bigger than Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. That's me below outside of the building, and the buddha below that. The picture does not do the size justice. One of his nostrils is 2' in diameter.

So, today was again a pretty touristy day and because of the weather, we couldn't sit and sketch. More of your general sightseeing kind of day. We're staying in Nara which is having its 1300th anniversary of being a former capital of Japan. Nara's famous for its deer which wander around like squirrels, so I included a picture of us communing with the deer. On the Flickr site, there are more people + deer images.