Asahikawa Tabe Marche

This Saturday was the first day of the Asahikawa Tabe Marche, a three-day-long food festival. (Monday is a national holiday, Respect for the Aged Day.)

Asahikawa Station was full of food booths.

The area in front of the station was full of booths.

This section was dedicated to ramen. There were a lot of different kinds all in the same place.

I bought curry pan from this place.

 It was really good! A nice change from the kind of curry I cook for myself.

Big plates of fried chicken.

Choco bananas.

Big ol' crepes. Look, some of them have whole puddings inside.

The booths continued down one street all the way to Tokiwa Park. That's about 3km of food booths!
Here's Asappy and his girlfriend, Yukkirin.

Tokiwa Park was decorated with colouring sheets done by elementary school students.

Some were cuter than others.

On stage at Tokiwa Park these girls were doing the dance from Lilo and Stitch.

 The Bank of America was serving poutine. Fellow Canadians were reportedly "disappointed."

 OrGy-PorGy was there too! The best name for any business.

Shaved frozen strawberries with condensed milk. It's like a sno-cone except good!

 Here's me, Johnathan Alexander, Jin, and Arthur enjoying some beef and fish cakes.

 And here's me, Queena, Jin, and Michael. Since Hokkaido is Japan's largest prefecture, in addition to our prefectural advisor, we have block advisors in each of five smaller divisions. Michael is the advisor for my block. He's been with JET for three years so far.

After Tabe Marche, we went to this foreigner-friendly bar, Borderless World.

It had these amusing warning signs outside.

We also did some karaoke.

 Then we got some authentic nikuman! Michael is a regular here.

 (Man is the Japanese word for bao.)

Then it turned out we missed the last train back north. The schedule Queena checked was either wrong of the train was cancelled or something. Anyway, we were stuck in Asahikawa. Luckily, Michael lives in Asahikawa and had enough futons for everybody. His apartment is just made for guests! He was very kind and let us all crash at his place.