Dances With Deer

This past weekend, on Sunday, I had a good time. I went with my girlfriend's family to a place not too far from Osaka called Nara Koen. If you don't know about Nara Koen, it is a beautiful place. It's a very large public park between the city of Nara and the small mountains east of there. For me, living in a large city with hardly any greenery, it's a sight for sore eyes. Lots of grass, lots of trees... places where you can actually sit and have a picnic. It's great. Plus, at Nara Koen there are a few temples, shrines, and historical spots.

But those things are nothing compared to the real attraction at Nara Koen: deer. Lots of them. Just walking out in the open. That's the amazing thing to me. You can go there and just pet deer. Imagine trying to do that in the U.S.

Anyway, I went there with many members of my girlfriend's family: her, her mother, her sister, her mother's two cousins, one of their husbands and their children. One of her mother's cousins brought a big cart with several grocery bags of food for the deer: lettuce, bananas, bread, cucumbers, carrots, among other things. It was amazing. See, usually people buy the special deer cookies available at the park and feed that to the deer. Not many people actually buy fresh vegetables to give to the deer, and if they do, it's usually just one head of lettuce, a few carrots... something like that. Not a whole cart of the stuff. When we were walking in the park, many people did a double take at our group and our big cart of vegetables. It was a little embarrassing. At the same time, it was very cool. I'm lucky to have a girlfriend with that kind of family, one that has their own way of doing things and aren't embarrassed about it. That's unusual in Japan.