Day 15 - Nara

Today has been a relatively lazy day in comparison to others, although we still managed to fit in about 16,100 steps. We are staying two nights here in Nara so we had a bit of a sleep in and didn't get out of the guest house till close to 9.30 this morning. We went on a morning ramble, looking for a place to have breakfast on the way to visit a (free) historic townhouse in the Naramachi district. We managed to find a place that did a great coffee but not food.

Then we stumbled upon a fabulous mechanical toy museum that had examples of toys that you could actually play with. The lovely lady who was working there showed us how to use the toys and play the games. We even played with an early version of spinning tops like modern Beyblades and I beat Gabby at a different kind of Chinese checkers/ draughts. We had a lot of fun and it was a terrific way to start the day.

Still on the hunt for food, we found the historic townhouse and spent a short while wandering through that. After that we eventually found a patisserie that did some delicious breakfasty types savoury breads and sweet pastries, and not so great coffee.

We are on the hunt for obi sashes to tie up our yukatas so we kept diving into likely looking new and used kimono shops everywhere we found them. Only one obi was found in this fashion today.

We then popped into the Nara Prefecture Museum of Art for a quick sqizz before taking a walk down a street with a deer and then heading back to accommodation for a bit of a pause in our exhausting day!

The hunt for dinner drew us out again after 4pm, looking for a pizza place that was actually open. This hunt took a lot longer than it reasonably should have (and involved dropping into a craft museum as well) but in the end we found a nice place to eat but not before wandering around for 90mins or more, and then stopped for ice-cream on the way home again.

Big day all round, really. Relaxing but still quite entertaining.Read more