A Meeting in Obihiro

Last weekend I took a trip to Obihiro for the HAJET fall meeting. Obihiro is a city of about 150,000 people, located in the Tokachi area of Hokkaido. It is a large farming area, the main crops are wheat, potatoes, beets and beans. It is home to the "pristine" Satsunai river, which, like the Mississippi River, is largely polluted by fertilizer runoff from local agriculture.

I was nervous about the train ride, since my experience taking trains includes only a couple days in Chicago, chaperoned by a friend with a Smartphone, and going by myself from Yakumo to Sapporo with no transfer. That's it. There is like one train in Minnesota and I've never taken it. To Obihiro, I took a limited express train, transferred at Minami Chitose, and somehow figured out from which platform my train departed and which car was for unreserved seats. Being in Japan is in indispensable learning experience in so many ways. 

Upon arrival, I visited the Kita no Yatai foodstand, an alleyway of unique, compact restaurants. The area is famous for a dish of glazed pork on rice called butadon. We stayed at the New Hotel Obihiro, a fairly priced place that smelled like decades of cigarette smoke had seasoned the walls.

The training was rather minimal, but I enjoyed HAJET's ongoing game of assassins (I made the first kill by getting someone to say 'galaxy' only about 2 minutes after the game began), the Halloween costume contest (I dressed as Dr. Horrible, an obscure reference that helped me find kinship with some nerds), and the pub quiz, despite the way HAJET seems like a selective group of insiders who operate by the same popularity rules as high school, and the tendency for the 3rd+ year JETS to take every opportunity to interject with their undying expertise. That was a long sentence. 

I was glad to have some time to walk around during the day, and I found Obihiro's Park: Midori ga oka koen. Only a 15 minute walk from the train station, there is a park golf course, open green spaces, gardens, an art museum, a pond with mallards and some trails. It was a lovely fall day for a stroll.

I had some good times, met some friends, and took the train back to Yakumo feeling less than 100% after a night of ample festivities, if you catch my euphemism.