Jar Jar Binks is even more spitefully hateful in Japanese than he is in English. Donald Duck in Japanese however, is simply the coolest thing ever.

Today, after that crushingly stressful exam yesterday, had us embarking on a wonderfully welcome field trip. We went off to Nara (the oldest city in Japan) home to some of the most impressive shrines in the world (and I really don't think I'm exaggerating here). Although there are some very impressive places scattered around the mountains of China, I really don't think anything compares to the Todai-ji, which as well as being the largest wooden structure in the world (and its current incarnation is actually a third smaller than it used to be; it has been burned and rebuilt twice, the last time being in the early 18^th century) also used to have an accompanying pagoda that was an amazing three hundred feet tall (recall that these were also first built using state of the art 8^th century wood working technology). That unfortunately is no longer there, because the second time it burned the government lacked the funds to build it a third time (which is also why the main temple building was made smaller).

One of the neatest thing inside the temple was a hole in one of the support pillars. I'm not quite sure why it was originally put there, but supposedly if you could crawl through it your karmic luck would be increased.

I got stuck.

I was, unfortunately, too wide across the shoulders to make it through, and although I stuck my hands above my head and wriggled for all I was worth, I could not get through. And then I had trouble getting back as well (it was about four feet thick, I made it about one foot in). At that point, prompted by latent claustrophobia (and imaging headlines reading "National Treasure mauled in order to rescue stupid foreigner") I was able to get myself back out, although I think I managed to pull every muscle in both shoulders in the process. It certainly could've been worse. One of the other guys got stuck halfway through, and we had to do some prett mighty heaving on his legs to retrieve his sorry self. On my way out of the temple I paid to get my fortune told, which basically ended up being, "you're luck is going to be terrible, but it will be all right in the end." Fitting, since that seems to be the general story of my life. Ah well, nunquam dimitte.

Another famous attraction at the park were the tame deer that were allowed to wander freely. They almost killed me. Now before that, I'd thought that they were extraordinarily cute. After all, previously the closest I've been to a deer is the road kill I pass on the freeway (these however were much smaller than the average white tail), and if you moved slowly you could actually pet them (I also had a couple walk up and start licking me, one rather persistently going after my arm[well, I had been sweating all day so I'm sure I tasted like a giant noisy salt lick]). Then, I bought some of those deer crackers, and all the cuteness fled. You see, you could purchase these wafers to feed to the deer, and at the same time I also purchased a maple syrup shaved ice. Now the deer knew exactly what it meant when a person had wafers in their hand, and as they swarmed me under for those, they also decided that they wanted my shaved ice. The enchantment fled when I realized that the deer only were pretending to be cute, but were in reality spoiled jerks who wanted to do nothing more than steal all my tasty food. It was however when eight point bucks started getting pushy that I realized what a dire situation I was in. At that point, like the manly man I am, I threw the crackers in their faces, raised my shaved ice high above my head, and bolted, shrieking 'Aku shka! Aku shika!' (evil deer! Evil deer!)

I'm starting to run low on famous religious sites I can get myself bared from.

Afterwards I came home, tried, footsore and slightly chewed, to find my host family watching Star wars: Episode One. And I heard Jar-Jar spewing Japanese, and momentarily wished that the deer _had_ eaten me. But then it cut to commercials, one of which was for Disneyland Tokyo, and I heard Donald Duck speaking Japanese, ad you know, that made me realize that maybe the world was all right after all.