Japan 2013 #2

Day 3-4 see me heading down to Nara Park, Osaka Aquarium and Kyoto respectively. 

So Nara Park is one of the more famous attractions around Osaka. It's filled with roaming deer that are supposedly still quite wild. As you can see, they even warn people about this. The deer are fairly tame for the most part, keeping to themselves unless you happen to buy some deer feed from the various vendors selling them around the park. At which point, they converge on you. 

Then there's also the fact there's a lot of deer shit to watch out for...The trip was slightly dampened by the fact that it was raining. Again. Which was really annoying.

Once we had finished our tour of Nara park, we headed to Osaka Aquarium, the largest Aquarium in Japan. There were tons of sharks there, ranging from whale sharks to hammerheads. But no great whites though. 

The cool thing though is the fact that there's a special downloadable tour for the Nintendo DS. You download the tour to your DS via wifi then when you walk along the exhibits, you can choose to play back the pre-recorded audio tour for each exhibit you're visiting. 

Another cool thing is the amount of glass they use in the Aquarium. It's very very thick glass and weighs a ton, literally. The amount of glass that goes into the Aquarium is staggering. Also, they let you touch stingrays and sharks. Or as someone I know said, the shark gets to touch me -_-

After the Aquarium, we took a short ride on a giant Ferris wheel from which I could see Universal Studios Osaka from.

The next day saw us traveling to Kyoto, which was a short 20+ minute train ride and saw us checking into a pretty nice hotel. Seriously, next time we're just going to stay in Kyoto and travel to Osaka. We ended up walking to Kyomizudera temple from the hotel, which took about 30 mins. Kyoto's apparently not that big and then walking back. At which point we were pretty shagged. Our 3DS told us we had roughly walked 17,000 steps in total that day.

We got to take some pretty nice photos of the autumn colors though. Too bad not every tree was turning red yet. With that done, we headed back to the hotel again...by walking there and ended up going to the nearby shopping street for food.