Travel notes: RubyKaigi Hakodate | Max Bernstein

home<br>blog<br>microblog<br>favorites<br>pl resources<br>bread<br>recipes<br>rss

Travel notes: RubyKaigi Hakodate

May 18, 2026

I just got back from a three and a half week trip to Japan. It was the longest<br>trip I have ever been on (aside from studying abroad in Germany, which felt<br>different). I made the following wild circuit with only a backpack and a<br>duffel:

Tokyo

Toyama

Kanazawa

Nara ish

Ito

Hakodate

Nikko

Mashiko

Karuizawa

Tokyo

This trip was split into three parts: time with my immediate family, going to a<br>conference, and then time with my partner. They were all great and also I am<br>glad to be home.

I’ll post my abbreviated travel notes here, including activity and food<br>recommendations.

Part one

We started in Tokyo but we were only there for about 40 hours. We focused our<br>time mostly on arts and crafts: we did a kintsugi workshop, spent time at an<br>artists cooperative, and then did a lot of walking around. This was a good<br>intro to the trip, because everyone kept waking up at 4am and crashing at 7pm<br>due to the jet lag. 4am wakeup makes for nice morning walks to 7-Eleven.

I brought my family to T’s Tantan in Tokyo<br>Station because I’m vegetarian and it’s otherwise hard to find ramen that<br>approaches kosher in Japan. It continues to be great and I really appreciate<br>having a steady vegetarian option available. Many years ago when I visited<br>Tokyo there was a place that served a delicious tomato-based vegetarian ramen,<br>but I hear it has since permanently closed. Bummer.

We took the shinkansen to Kanazawa. I love the train. It’s fast. It’s quiet. You<br>can eat your snacks on board and gaze out the window as the world whizzes by.<br>It’s nice.

We toured a soy sauce factory (meh; they don’t let you in the room where the<br>magic happens) and the old town (pretty!) before finally eventually ending up<br>at our small hotel in Toyama: Satoyama Auberge Maki No Oto. I highly recommend<br>this hotel. It is beautiful, the staff is lovely, the food was excellent, and<br>they were very accomodating of me being vegetarian.

We continued on to Toyama, which is a port town. We got to talking with an<br>older local guy who told us all about his favorite local spots. We learned<br>after leaving that this guy has extraordinarily fancy taste and they were all<br>either Michelin starred or at least Michelin rated and with a lead time of<br>months. We opted to instead go to a local brewery, which had a ghost pepper<br>beer (!) and pizza.

We then moved on via train to Osaka, where we transferred to a car to head<br>(eventually) to our hotel in the hills near Nara. We toured the Daimon sake<br>brewery. They explained every little thing about the process, which was<br>especially interesting to me, as I’ve done some small amount of homebrewing and<br>I bake. They sounded similar. We had a tasting and even got to talk to<br>Daimon-san. I recommend going.

I also recommend the Akame 48 waterfalls walk/hike, which has some exquisite<br>falls, and Murou Art Forest. They had some really wonderful installations.

My brother and I parted ways from the rest of my family in Osaka: they headed<br>further west and we headed north to Itō on the Izu peninsula. We got a surprise<br>perfectly clear view of Fuji along the way.

It’s beautiful there. They don’t seem to welcome foreigners in a lot of their<br>restaurants (we were turned away several times) but one place had a guy who<br>enthusiastically welcomed us in. We ended that evening enjoying a some food and<br>a beer while also being stared at by a 300lb completely tattooed guy. It was a<br>little unsettling but we left without incident.

My brother and I made our way to Tokyo for the day before his flight and before<br>my train north to Hakodate for RubyKaigi. I once again did that thing where I<br>walked around in humid 80F heat with a large backpack and pants and was<br>extraordinarily warm toward the end of the day. After about a liter of Aquarius<br>on the train north I felt better.

Part two

I stayed at Yunokawa Prince Hotel<br>Nagisatei which I would like to<br>especially call out for having an enormous, diverse, and very vegetarian<br>friendly breakfast. Every morning I got to try new and tasty things and even<br>feel full after. It was great.

Hakodate is beautiful in the spring. I arrived at peak cherry blossom season<br>and Goryokaku, their star shaped fort, is absolutely decked out in cherry<br>blossoms. It is also moderately swarmed by tourists (in this case, three cruise<br>ships). It didn’t feel over-crowded though. I enjoyed eating at The Bear King<br>which had a vegetarian friendly option.

The next day was the committer meeting. I don’t remember a ton from it other<br>than people talking at length about the semantics of deep freezing an object<br>(do you freeze its class? its class’s superclass? …?). I picked up my badge<br>and also got to check out my colleague Chris Salzberg’s bar<br>SOLENOID! It’s a neat spot. I<br>headed out to go find some dinner.

This is about when I got a message on my phone that there was going to be an<br>earthquake,...