Winter in Obihiro

The next night our friend from the University, Kazuki came from Sapporo for a visit. Kaz, Kat, Akamine and her sister, Naka and I all went to bartend at the light festival which lasted until about 9:30. Not having eaten on this freezing cold night, we went to the restaurant market in downtown Obihiro. The restaurant market is one very narrow pedestrian street with little booth restaurants crammed together on either side. The booth restaurants all specialize in something, for example, there is a sushi booth, a ramen booth, a soba booth etc. Each restaurant is made up of one tiny room, probably about 8 meters square in total. This includes the kitchen, the two cooks, often husband and wife teams and a bar style table that wraps around the tiny kitchen and chefs. We went to a ramen house and took up the whole booth with just the six of us. The booth set up almost forces you to talk to the cooks preparing food right in front of you, and makes for a very laid back and friendly meal.

The next day, Akamine's sister left but Kazuki was still here so we decided to go skating in what he called "the forest." It turns out that the forest is not a forest at all, and in fact has less trees than downtown Obihiro. The forest is the name for a complex of arenas in Obihiro that is apparently famous for turning out Olympic speed skaters. We got to the ice rink but it was not open for recreational skating and we ended up watching the Obihiro-Hakodate men's final hockey game.  I never thought I would find myself watching a hockey game in Northern Japan, since I've barely seen a hockey game in Canada, but there I was explaining the rules that I knew to my friends. We left after the first period, there is only so much Canadian culture shock I can handle, and made for the speed skating dome to see if we could try that. We ended up walking in through the back door of the Hokkaido speed skating championships, for those who didn't make it to the Olympics. This is the speed skating dome that is used by the speed skating high school in Obihiro, where promising speed skaters from Japan go to get through high school while maintaining vigorous training schedules. We watched the whole 1 and a half hour race, which was very exciting, and then wandered out again, not knowing if we should have paid or not.  

Kazuki brought peanut balls, my favorite kind from Sapporo, and we crunched away all the way back to the office!