As I write this post, I’m sitting in my dorm room at my study away program in the suburbs of Osaka, Japan. Osaka is a city of almost three million people. If you add the neighboring cities of Kyoto, Nara, and Kobe, which together with Osaka form the ‘Keihanshin’ metro area, this region of Japan is home to almost twenty million people. Traveling from one end of the Keihanshin to the other takes easily over an hour — and that’s if you take Japan’s super-fast bullet train. It can easily take three hours by car.
My semester here is almost over. I know I’m going to miss the friends I’ve made here, to say nothing of the places I’ve gone, the food I’ve tried, and of course Japan’s extensive public transport system. But I do find myself feeling just a little nostalgic for Oberlin.
Look: Oberlin is a town of around eight thousand people. I can run from one side of town to the other in under twenty minutes. And having spent five semesters regularly doing just that, I love every inch of it to death.
Looking at a map of Oberlin, your attention will probably be drawn to the center first. That’s where Oberlin’s two main thoroughfares cross: Lorain Street and Main Street. Together they form a kind of bullseye, around which you can find most of the shops, restaurants and other businesses that make up the heart of Oberlin. The actual college campus is a five minute walk to the west, across Oberlin’s version of Central Park: Tappan Square.
Oberlin students love Tappan Square. It’s a liminal space of sorts, right between the center of town and the campus. It’s where your conversations from a restaurant meal come to their natural conclusions, as you and your friends walk back up to your dorm room. On warm May days, professors move their classes outside into Tappan Square; students take their study circles away from Terrell Library and out into the sunlight; runners and bikers pass through the park’s asterisk of paths headed for points east. In the fall, local food vendors proffer samples from booths in the park; in the wintertime, there are snowball fights.
I pass through Tappan Square to get to my favorite running routes. Most days, I run from my dorm room into the park, then I pick a direction and follow it. Sometimes I go east, past the Apollo Theater, which also contains a recording studio and where I once recorded a live play D&D episode. Lorain Street, in this direction, leads to the North Coast Inland Trail, a shaded bike path that follows the route of an old railroad. This part of the town is beautiful in the fall. (Practically every part of Oberlin is beautiful in the fall.)
Sometimes I go south. I pass my favorite restaurants. Thi Ni Thai has the best Thai food I’ve ever had in my life. At the Feve, I don’t get judged for ordering a fried egg on top of my burger. Further down Main Street there’s the Arboretum, home to miles of nature trails. Once, I decided to listen to a podcast for my creative writing class while walking through the Arboretum at night. It turned out that it was a horror podcast. I got a little lost in the woods. I had quite a lot to say in class the next day.
Then, there’s Oberlin’s campus proper. There’s the student center, the cafeterias, the practice rooms whose pianos you can tell apart by ear. There’s the koi pond, outside the Conservatory. People do their work there; they practice their instruments there. I always thought it would be fun to have a concert there and serenade the fish.
There’s Oberlin’s Terrell Library, which never gets called that. (The library is in the larger building of Mudd Center. So in my experience, practically everyone also refers to the library itself as ‘Mudd.’) My friends and I always gather at this one specific table on the east side of the second floor. Sometimes I go there without checking if my friends are already there — more often than not, they are.
And then there are the innumerable dorm lounges and little nooks and crannies where people gather. I’m particularly fond of Langston Hall’s Starlight Lounge, which is possessed of a piano and a number of stars painted on its ceiling. Every Friday night, a group gathers there to play Blood on the Clocktower (which I’ve covered in another blog post), so of course I've made lots of good memories there. Sometimes I come early to play the piano.
And, of course, there’s so much more to Oberlin, far more than I can say in a single post. The bike trail extends for miles in either direction, and there are shops and restaurants that I haven’t even been to yet.
I leave Japan in just over a month. After the summer, I’ll be back at Oberlin for my final year of college. As I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do next, I’ve been having flashbacks to three years ago, when I was deciding which college I was going to go to.
In my last post, I talked a little about why I decided to come to Oberlin. I hope that this post can serve as a bit of a companion piece — if the things that I love, and miss, about living in Oberlin have come across in this post, then I’ll have done my job. I’m publishing this at the very end of April, a double-digit number of hours before America’s college decision deadline. So if you’re a high school senior trying to decide what you’re going to do next year, I hope that this post and my last post can help you in making your decision. I wish you the very best of luck.
