a long day on the go
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
We spent the night in an interesting little hotel that's next to one of the main Japan Rail station in Matsuyama. It was an inexpensive, no-frills cost-saving effort after our more expensive stay at a fancy ryokan in the hot-springs part of town the night before. What caught Mari's attention was the meticulous devotion the staff had to "continuous improvement". They offered a survey, as many hotels due, but along with the survey they offered a list of things that the hotel had actually done in response to their guests' survey responses. That included:
+ starting a bike rental service
+ adding a coin-op laundry room to the hotel
+ adding a basket of small activity books and toys for kids
+ adding a rack in the tiny lobby where you could buy emergency things like phone chargers, toothbrushes, etc
It was a delight.
We set off early in the morning, heading to the neighboring train station to catch a bus that took us to the docks. We boarded the same express ferry we'd taken to get to Matsuyama, and were soon back in Hiroshima where we boarded a street car to get us to the shinkansen express train. That took us back to Fukuoka, where it was by that time 37°C, where we switched to a second shinkansen (the two trains barely stopped) for Kumamoto on Kyushu's west coast. It's a part of the country I'd like to see, some day. There, we took another bus all the way to Miyazaki on Kyushu's east coast, and finally a "one man" train (so-called because it's staffed with only a single person) back to Nichinan. Whew!
