Horyuji, Japan 2019

Nara (continued)

In the morning I took another stroll around Nara enjoying its contemporary and traditional architecture. One mysterious building had almost no windows, a small entrance door and no sign of what it is.

Horyiji is a place close Nara with the world oldest surviving wooden structures. Some were built in the 6^th – 8^th centuries. I find it hard to believe that timber did not rot in humid Japan during those years but this is what descriptions of these buildings say.

Before going to Horyiji Temple, my husband and I decided to have lunch in a café nearby. An English menu was not available. The menu in Japanese was brief and had few photos. One of them showed some soup. We thought that we could not go wrong with ordering it.

A waitress brought us a metal bucket that contained the ingredients for our soup in the upper half. Then she lit fuel in the lower half and gestured to indicate that we should stir the soup until it was cooked. The fuel, probably charcoal that for some reason was of sky blue color, burned exactly the time needed to cook pieces of chicken, noodles and a little bit of vegetables. The soup tasted good and it was fun to make it despite our initial shock when we realized that we were cooking it ourselves.

The complex of Horyiji Temple consists of several buildings. One of them is a 5-story pagoda. It was prohibited to take pictures of the artifacts inside. All I could do was to take photos of how they look from outside. The buildings are typical for Japanese temples so I post here only one picture.

There were hardly other individual visitors. However groups of school students were coming one after another. They walked to a building, briefly stood in front of it, listened to their guide and moved on.

Japanese shrines and temples provide potable water at the gates. Every watering place has different design. Water can come from a dragon mouth or a beak of a fantastic bird or a simple well.

Osaka