This morning we had breakfast included with our stay at Dormy Inn. Well, when I say included, we clearly paid for it when we booked the hotel, but anyway, we paid for it a long time ago, so basically it was free. We got up early to beat the rush (and the people coughing on the food) and were pleasantly surprised to see it was actually a really amazing breakfast. It was buffet style, but everything was presented so nice and there was minimal chance of people coughing on food items (although some guy did put his sleeve into a whole lot of bowls of tofu) It was Japanese style – so fish, tofu, Natto, rice that kind of thing, and it was all (mostly) local produce. Very impressed! Looking forward to tomorrow’s breakfast!

The weather wasnt so great today. Cold, raining and even thunder and lightning. Neither of us can remember even being in Japan during a thunderstorm before. We decided to do a load of washing and check our upcoming schedule, that kind of thing, for a while anyway.

Once the washing was done, we decided we had to get out in to the weather. We still hadn’t really decided what we wanted to do. Matsuyama castle is on our to do list but we thought we would leave that until tomorrow when it is (hopefully) not raining.

We finally decided to go and check out Dogo Onsen and the surrounding area. Dogo Onsen is a very famous and old onsen. We really wanted to go to it, but we had heard it can be really busy and also it is under renovation at the moment so you can only go to one level of it. It is one of several onsen that were (apparently) inspiration for the bath house in the Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away.

We caught the street car down to the Dogo onsen area. There was a long covered shopping arcade near the onsen, so we looked at some shops there for a bit.

There are 2 other onsen near Dogo – the Dogo Onsen Annex (newly built) and another older one that was built in the 50’s – they both looked really cool and surprisingly not at all busy. Maybe it was the cold weather, but we decided we needed to go for an onsen – so we went to check out Dogo as well. It didn’t look busy so we decided this was the onsen for us. We ended up being given a time to come back (in an hour) which suited us perfectly.

We went off and looked at some more shops and had a snack of a rice cracker and a Mikan juice. Mikan is the local citrus specialty around here – it’s kind of mandarin-esque but tastes a bit lime-y also.

An hour passed very quickly and so we headed back to Dogo. The baths were great and not too busy at all – and it is such an amazing old building. The stairs leading down to the baths were VERY steep and slightly scary. Feeling all toasty and refreshed after the onsen we walked up to a nearby lookout which had a nice view over the town (and a foot onsen – but we were all soaked out by that stage)

It was lunch time by now and so we headed back to a little cafe we saw when we got off the street car earlier in the morning. It was up some stairs and had a nice view of the station and street. The menu was all in Japanese with no pictures. We figured out most of it, but the ladies on the table next to us had an amazing looking meal that we could not find on the menu anywhere. We ended up just pointing to their meal “Kore wa nan desu ka?” It had a strange name like “Colour plate” or something, no wonder we couldn’t find it on the menu. It was basically a taster or sampler plate I guess. I ordered that and Steve ordered a Croque Monsieur toasted sandwich. And coffees of course.

Trying to order things with French names in Japanese is a whole other level of difficult!! These meals were FANTASTIC. Really, really good. We enjoyed our time there so much that we ended up ordering dessert and a couple more coffees (the coffee was also excellent) I got tiramisu and Steve got cheesecake.

We eventually thought we should probably leave, although we could’ve easily sat here for a othe few hours. Great little spot indeed.

The rain had eased slightly so we went to the nearby park that has the Yuzuki Castle ruins. We saw some Sakura although everything was a bit wet and cold. We went up a lookout and got a really cool view of the city. There was mist over the mountains which was super cool.

We walked around by the moat of the castle and saw some displays of some castle-y things. Then as we were rounding a corner by a canal we saw this huge heron just hanging out. It was totally looking at us and it looks just like the freaky heron from the Studio Ghibli film The Boy and The Heron. It was super cool and I proceeded to take about 50 photos of it.

After the heron sighting we walked back to the street car and caught it to Matsuyama City station and looked at the delicious foods in the Takashimaya food basement but decided not to buy any because we have a Mitsukoshi store right near our accommodation and we thought we could pick up some things for dinner there. So we walked back to our accommodation through the mall, looked at a few more shops and made it to Mitsukoshi. However, it kind of sucked and they didn’t really have a proper basement food level and we were sad that we didn’t get things at Takashimaya. So what did we do? We got back on that street car and went back to Takashimaya and made it there before closing and managed to get 2 of the last 3 Uni (sea urchin) croquettes as well as a bunch of other stuff that we ate back at the hotel. And yes it was all delicious.