The conference organizers really wanted to make sure we had an amazing experience, so Tuesday morning they arranged a “Shikayose” or deer-calling ceremony for us.

What do they call the deer  with?

A natural horn, playing, of all things, a 5 note excerpt from Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony.

It does seem to work. More and more deer, obviously trained to associate Beethoven with crackers, came pouring out of the forest to join us as the horn player repeated his melodic fragment over and over.

And once they had summoned an enormous herd of deer – THAT’S when they gave us the crackers. The deer got VERY aggressive at that point, to the extent that it was actually difficult to unwrap the crackers at all without a hungry deer knocking them out of your hand.

Once we were done being molested by ungulates, Leigh went off to have a nice time in Nara, while I went back to the conference. Perhaps she’ll write a post about her experience at some point.

I will continue not to regale you with tales of yttrium target synthesis, but here’s another deer picture I took on the way back to the hotel at the end of the day.

After we regrouped, we did the unthinkable – we went to dinner and didn’t take any pictures at all, even of an empty bowl.  A shame, too, because it was really life-changing soba.

Here’s a picture from Leigh’s lunch the day before at the same restaurant.  The fact that we went back should say something about how good it was.

And that’s about it for Tuesday.  Amazing how actually attending a conference really shortens the blog posts.  I’ll have more to say about Wednesday, though.