Nara was the first permanent capital of Japan. It also happened to be Jen's favourite site to visit during her first trip to Japan in 2006. As soon as you enter the Nara Park area it becomes pretty obvious why..
Over a thousand wild sika deer roam freely through the Nara area where they are protected and considered to be national treasures. Both tame and curious, they often approach visitors to see if we've purchased deer-crackers to feed to them :).
We didn't just come for the deer - Nara also has many world heritage sites. We visited Tōdai-ji, the Main Buddhist Temple,
wandered through the park to see the 3000 stone lanterns and various other shrines,
and strolled through Yoshikien Japanese garden (which we discovered is free for foreign tourists).
The other reason Jen remembered loving Nara was because of a fond memory of eating a hot freshly roasted Japanese sweet potato there. She spoke of it many times and we finally found one of the famous potato stands while leaving the park. A little local lady was set up with a portable potato roaster and a sign that said 200 yen (about $2.50 CAD). The lady pointed to a potato and Jen gave a nod, so she sliced it up, put it in a bag, and typed the price onto her calculator.
Turns out our Japanese could use much improvement - the rest of the sign must have indicated that the 200 yen is per 100g. So our $2.50 potato suddenly became a $10 potato! Oops! Well, we suppose we could have refused, but it really was our mistake and she was a cute little lady, so we went along with it and enjoyed eating the most expensive potato that either of us has ever tasted!
