Golden Week, Mountemplefest 2010 Day 4: Ship of Theseus problem? Yeah, the Japanese laugh and refuse to acknowledge the existence of such drivel.

Maybe you thought that I only went to three piddly little places and then started crying in a corner? You, my good gnathostomatid, would be sorely mistaken. There were more 世界遺産 (Sekai isan, World heritage sites) that I hadn’t visited; this time I visited two in one day, a feat rarely tried by a normal meatbag.

(“To be a good woman!”)

The two places I visited this time were Kashihara shrine (橿原神宮) and Horyu temple (法隆寺). Kashihara is a nice shrine, but quite boring. If it wasn’t for the year of the tiger stuff they have there (like in the picture above) I would have left quickly. This would have been very bad, for I would have missed something that would change my life, forever! I saw a newly married couple get their pictures taken which, per usual, made me want to hitch up with the next vertebrate that I met. What I didn’t know, to my dismay, is that I was the only being in Japan with a spine. Woe is me.

Horyu temple is old. Really old. Old old. Remember when you thought 20 was old? Well take that and make it a bigger number because this temple is older than that. Being one of the oldest wooden structures on the planet “The World” (a scary groupe) decided to designate Horyu as a good place for tourists to visit and take pictures (outside only, of course). Let’s say you would like to see pictures of the insides of the buildings or any of the relics. What you would need to do would be to purchase a plane ticket and get your large coccyx over here and look at them with your own eyes because that’s the only way it’s going to happen.