6/3 Ryan

About a week prior, I had gotten messages from one of my Sac State classmates named Ryan. He had told me that he was visiting Japan, and was going out of his way to come visit Matsuyama from Hiroshima. He would only be visiting for half a  day, but I decided to give try to pack as much as I could into his experience. He would take the ferry in the morning to Matsuyama, and arrive right when I would be teaching English Hour.

On the day of, I told my class that we had a special guest visiting today, and we went outside of MUSE to greet him. In our classroom, everyone introduced theirselves and asked each other questions. He talked about how he was stationed in Japan while in the Army and his experience with that. He took a group photo, and after that I took him on a mad dash to Dogo so he could see everything. We boarded the streetcar at the university, transferred to another streetcar a little ways up, and then arrived at the fancy Dogo Station/Starbucks.

It turned out that we made it just in time to watch the Karakuri Clocktower performance. From there we walked up to the world famous Dogo Hot Spring Bathhouse and he got some pictures. I had him pour water onto the stone, which I don't know what it does. From there we walked up so he could see the Isaniwa Shrine and the nice view from up there.

We walked back, and luckily enough there was a Kadoya restaurant, albeit little, that was still open for the day in Dogo. I immediately took Ryan in there so he could try all of the Matsuyama specialty food. By the way Kadoya is the premier location for good tai-meshi in the region. I had him order the same things as me. We each got a large tai-meshi with jakoten, a yuzu soda, and hojicha ice cream. All things that are famous in Matsuyama. I am pretty sure he liked them.

After that he had to catch the ferry back. We were both worried that he may just miss the last ferry of the night back to Hiroshima. We took the light rail down to the closest train station, and I saw him off. There is a little gap between the last station and the ferry terminal, where you can either walk or wait for a self-driving bus to take you the 0.5 mile between them. When he got there, he full on sprinted with his heavy backpack and made it no problem. He said that it was all thanks to his Army training.