We have entered the 21st century of travel - we rented an Airbnb apartment in Kyoto instead of getting a traditional hotel room! I have to admit, I was a little nervous since I've never used Airbnb (where you rent a house, apartment, or even just a room from an individual rather than a "company" - kind of like VRBO). But Satoko and Jaemin (the owners) were so amazing, and the place was awesome! I felt so travel- and tech-savvy!!
It was perfect for us, because we could make breakfast & tea in the morning, do laundry, hang out in the evening - and we had plenty of room for all of us. As you can see in this picture, we have our laundry hanging all over the place in this picture (no dryers in Japan!) We just did our laundry the 2nd morning we were there and hung it to dry while we were out for the day.
Unfortunately, I had forgotten how long it can take for things to dry during the rainy season, so I became really good friends with the blow dryer so I could wear my pajamas that night!
Some more pictures of a typical apartment in Japan:
They even left us coffee, tea, and sugar (!!) as well as laundry detergent and even toothpaste & toothbrushes (which we didn't need, but still...) We just grabbed some bread, yogurt, and other breakfast stuff at the convenience store down the street (1 min walk away!) and voila! Cheap and easy breakfast.
One of my favorite rooms in a Japanese house is the bathroom. It is actually broken up into 3 rooms - one with the sink & dressing area (which you can see is also the laundry room - washer reflected in the mirror.) This is actually a great arrangement also for conserving water, as you can use the water leftover from the bath for the first wash cycle in the washing machine. Some people do this by just running a hose from the bath to the washer. Americans might think, "ew! dirty bathwater in the washer??" but actually the bathwater isn't really very dirty since you wash yourself completely before you get into the bath, which is just used for soaking, not cleaning. Plus, you have a second wash cycle and a rinse cycle with fresh water. So, it's a great way to use resources wisely in a country with limited access to the kinds of resources Americans take for granted (like water, electricity, gas, landfill space, etc.)
Right next to the room above is the actual bath room - the room with the bath/shower. This room is very different from our bathrooms in America. The entire room is the shower/bath, and is sealed off when we close the door, much like a shower door only more leak-proof. On the floor outside of the tub is a drain, so we can either shower (see the shower head at the top left of this picture) or use the water we put in the bath to wash our bodies. We can't just jump in the tub and start scrubbing though, this is NOT OK! We could sit on the little (usually plastic) stool, use a little bucket to dip the water out of the tub and dump it over our heads and body as we wash BEFORE we got into the tub to just soak our stress away! This bathroom doesn't have the stool and bucket, so we just used the shower.
The panel on the wall in the above picture is another AMAZING feature of the Japanese bathroom - an automatic control panel for the bath tub!! Here we could set the temperature to whatever we liked (we set it to 41 degrees Celcius - nice and hot!) and to what level we wanted the water to be filled to. When it was finished filling the bath, it stopped automatically and played a nice "hey, bath's ready!" tune for us. If the water starts to cool below the desired temperature, it just added more hot water to adjust it back up. Most houses have a nice cover we can place over the bathtub (not this one). I'm sure there are many other nice features of the control panel but I don't know all of them. Since the custom is to wash and THEN soak, everyone uses the same bath water without refilling it - just for soaking.
The last of the 3 "bathrooms" is the toilet room, which is separate from both of the other two. Japanese folks don't like having the toilet in the same area as the bath and sink, which kind of makes sense to me.
Almost everywhere we have been, including public restrooms at gas stations, department stores, restaurants, etc., Japanese toilets have been waaaaay more high-tech than our do-nothing American toilets. They are at the very least heated. All of them. Most of them do other things as well. As you can see, there is a control panel on the side of this one. Some of them have the control panel on the wall next to them. Either way, you can spend hours playing with the buttons and trying to figure out (if you can't read Japanese) what they do. The girls had a blast trying to work these out!
Close up of the control panel on the toilet - features include: bidet (for washing one area), "bottom" washer (for another), water strength control (I suggest not "hard" - just sayin'), water temperature (I suggest "warm" - the middle light is your friend!)
Some toilets I have seen have a self-cleaning feature, music or "flushing noises" - either for entertainment or to cover up certain sounds I guess!
Anyway, all I can say is - why don't we have these toilets in America?? They've had these kinds of cool potties for more than 20 years!! We are way, way behind!! (no pun intended) Let's get into the 21st century! We have to get on the stick, people, and demand higher standards for our bathroom time!!
I'm going to find out how to import myself one of these for my house. I'll bet I'll have a lot more company coming to visit once I do. :-)