And so it Begins

At long last!  I finally get to eat melonpan (melonbread) again!

I’ve learned a great deal in the past twenty-four hours.  So much so that I’m unsure of where to begin!  I will create another post detailing my flight and covid testing experience and instead focus on my apartment and first day of quarantining here.  The jet lag is as strong as my excitement, but please bear with me!

My first day has been much like a tween’s first day home alone with a list of chores from mom that they’ve never tried before.  In America, I knew how to do the laundry, take a shower, and take out the trash.  But when I woke up this morning and started moving along with my day, I realized the game had changed, and I had some tutorials to play.

I suppose I will start with what I think is most different from life in America: The Bathroom.  Japanese homes traditionally separate the toilet from the bath and shower.  The “bath” room is truly a room for the bath, as it contains a bath and free-standing shower, as seen below:

If you look really closely above the tub, there is a small screen.  This screen is used to control the temperature of the water among other settings that I have not tinkered with yet (like amount of water and scheduling of the bath).  It controls both the bath and the shower’s water, which I was unaware of my first night as I groggily fumbled through a cold shower after a long day of travel.  A quick inquiry with a senior ALT cleared that up for me, thank goodness!

Somewhere in my apartment, there is another screen like this one.  Can you guess where?  I’ll give you a minute.  Think hard.  Where else would you need a screen that controls the temperature of your bath water?

If you guessed the kitchen, you win a free piece of melonpan!  

That’s right!  There’s a screen in the kitchen that can be used to start your bath.  Baths are a significant part of Japanese culture (I’ll put a whole post out about that in the future!), so being able to control the water from other parts of the house is convenient, indeed.  I could see myself using this feature!  Could you?

Next, I’d like to discuss laundry!  Japan has mastered the art of space efficiency, and that is reflected through the stylings of apartments and the appliances found within.  Long story short, most people have washers, but they don’t have dryers.  The electric cost and amount of space dryers take up are simply not efficient, so the laundry is air-dried instead.

My laundry machine is pretty straightforward to set up.  This is what I see when I start up the laundry:

Even though I figured out the combination of buttons, something still wasn’t right.  I could hear the door latch, and there was a slight humming, but after several minutes of waiting, nothing had moved.  After pondering and Googling and playing a game of “Press That Same Button Again Because Maybe It Will Be Different This Time,” I realized that the water hose was turned off.  Once I twisted the knob, it was good to go!  There was a note tied to the knob requesting that the water be turned off when the machine was not in use, and I was happy to oblige.

With water rushing into the drum like a waterfall of gold, I prepared myself mentally to hang dry the few items I had put in.  After looking at my neighbors’ porch setups (“when in Rome”), I found that the trick to hanging things like bed sheets is to drape the blanket and use a clip on either side under the bar.  Clothes could be handled similarly and hung on hangers, but I wanted to keep everything inside and use one of these fancy looking contraptions:

Half an hour later, my blanket was on the porch, and my clothes were hung inside.  I noticed that they were not nearly as wet as freshly washed laundry in America.  The word “damp” suddenly felt vivid as I truly understood what it meant.  My idea of “damp” had actually just been “sopping,” and my experiences with air-drying had been waiting an entire day for a t-shirt to stop dripping.  But that was not the case here.  Nay, these clothes looked ready to air-dry and actually finish before my time in Japan ends.

(It’s worth noting that apartments can have special features in the bath room or on the AC unit that help with the drying process.  Because I didn’t have much to dry, I let them simply hang.)

I was surprised when I brought the blanket in and tested my clothes.  Everything was perfectly dry and smelled just as clean as if I had been using my familiar American devices.  It took maybe two hours for everything to be completely dried while I was expecting it to take much longer.  I was glad my first attempt had gone so smoothly!  Now, I’ll just need to make sure I check the weather so that I don’t let any fresh clothes get soaked!

“What about the trash chore?” you may ask. That can of worms will require a post all its own, so be on the look out for that!

I learned much more, but I will stop here so as to not ramble for too long.  Now that the adventure has actually begun, you can expect to see many more posts from here on out!  See you next time!