Darlo's World

Warning, this post may not be appropriate for young’uns.

So I’d briefly mentioned about Love Hotels in my Kinky in Kinki post back in January, and definately wanted to see inside one at some point out of general curiosity. Being told various things like “the rooms have karaoke and game consoles in them” definately added to my curiosity. After finding a friend who was also curious about the goings on, we decided to check out one of them in Umeda.

For those that don’t know, in a nutshell a Love Hotel is a hotel designed for couples to enjoy some quiet alone time, and can be paid for by the hour or overnight.

I’d just like to take this moment to say that we did not do anything of an adult nature at the hotel. ಠ_ಠ

Before meeting up at Umeda Station, I had a nose around Umeda’s Love Hotel area looking at prices by the hour. Prices really varied depending on the grandeur of the hotel, and at times the rooms had different charges dependant on theme or popularity. The cheapest I’d found was 2,000 yen (£13.38) and most expensive over 8,000 yen (£53.51), with the common price being around the 3,000 yen mark (£20.06). Ironically the least expensive hotel appeared to be one of the less dodgy, but as I’ve seen many times in Japan appearances can be deceptive.

After having a bit of food we headed over to the cheapest establishment. We must have been there at a relatively busy time as we saw one couple leaving (satisfied smiles on faces), and another couple heading in (excited smiles on faces). Apparently the 2,000 yen room had been taken so we opted for the next cheapest room at 2,500 yen (£16.73). At this particular hotel (might be different in others), when you walk in there’s a large wall with pictures of the different rooms and buttons to make your selection (pretty much like a vending machine). It then prints you out a ticket and you head to your room; there’s a little flashing light above your door. When your time is up you pay at a window which is partially obscured to protect privacy, however the security cameras kind of make it directly inadequate. Perhaps it’s to give the customer peace of mind that they don’t have to look in the eye of the cashier.

We headed to our room, conveniently on the bottom floor, and after taking off our shoes we slid the door open to reveal a quaint Japanese style tatami room. Off to the left was the rather nice looking bathroom, complete with washlet and various accessories standard of normal hotels; shampoo etc. Through another door was a large bath and shower area (plenty of room for 2 ^_~), which had a window giving a view of the main bedroom and vice-versa. By flicking a certain light switch, the whole room went red. Romantic for some, this just seemed to remind me of many blood stricken horror films.

And then the main bedroom. A huge futon bed taking up the majority of the space that I could easily have just stayed in all day. Perhaps it’s because my dorm bed isn’t wanderful, but this bed felt great. The only thing that marred it for me was the knowledge of “I know what people have done in this bed” >_<. After flicking on the TV and getting a screen full of boobs and pixels (in Japan certain aspects of pornography are illegal, so those aspects are generally pixelated or blurred) using a series of complex remote controls we managed to flick through some of the other channels, trying to find the karaoke and games. Yes, we did have karaoke, and yes there was a game system; not a PS3 like I'd been led to believe, but perhaps that's in one of the more expensive rooms.

Generally the room itself was really nice, and had it not been for the condoms at the head of the bed instead of the customary chocolate mints, I'd have been none the wiser. But it was time to get to action and do what we'd set out to do by coming to this Love Hotel. I opened my bag, and pulled out my copy of Kanji in Context and cracked on with some revision. What? Did you forget I have an important exam on Friday? My friend also had some work she needed to do so we both got on with it for a bit.

Finishing the hour with a little karaoke we left the room; the room itself was probably very dissapointed with us.

Love Hotels are something I’ve only really seen or heard about in Japan. When I spoke to some people at home about them they instantly got the wrong idea, thinking of brothels or a hotel where people just did it any old where. To be honest I probably won’t visit another one during my remaining couple of weeks, and it’s doubtful I’ll ever go to another one. However, we were really curious about what the more upscale rooms or hotels would be like.

In other news, today is Children’s Day.

I’ve got to make this a short blog tonight as I’ve got a fair bit of stuff to do; revise for a kanji quiz, homework, shower and of course start packing. Officially I move on Saturday, but my new room in Kita-Umeda has become ready so I can at least start shifting stuff.

So yesterday was pretty cool. After a nice lie-in I met up with a couple of friends at Uni and proceded to tackle the last day of the school fayre. As usual we dove head on into the aggressive sellers, only this time we were accompanied by our old English friend … rain. Not only was this the day that I’d left my brolly at home, but it was also the day that I’d decided not to bring in my washing that was hanging out.

Balls.

Growing weary of the fayre, and full of random food (including a fried potato coated in some kind of sauce (name forgotton >_<) and yakitori (skewered chicken)) we decided to head to karaoke for a couple of hours, and then afterwards head to Sushiro, a sushi restaurant where food is on conveyor belts.

Karaoke was great fun, as is the norm. We booked two hours, and since there were only three of us, we tried a lot of songs that we’d never done before. For example I took a shot at Nantoka Nare and Hito Toshite Jiku ga Bureteiru amongst others.

Needing to kill some time before heading to the restaurant, we took a trip to Nishinomiya Kitaguchi. Not really much happened here, as I said we were mainly killing time. So forgive me while we skip on ahead.

One thing I will draw back to is my introduction to an anime series that’s … odd. Oruchuban Ebichu was introduced to me by one of my fellow foreigners and despite it’s general crude, animal abusing, blood-dripping, sex filled content, I found it to be quite funny. Possibly because of the fact that it’s cute appearance is a tremendous contrast to what is actually happening.

I’m not going to ruin it by telling you what goes on (I have a feeling your curiosity will have got the better of you by now anyway), but I will explain that there is a long running joke throughout the series where a certain word is used. I’m not going to say what the word is nor will I write down it’s English quivalent, so I’ll use an English word it is similar to … Mango.

The reason I explain this will come to light shortly.

The restaurant was really nice, and a very relaxing place. On our arrival it was almost empty, giving us a good 4 seater area (one seat had all our stuff). There are two methods of getting food at Sushiro, both very easy. The first method is to sit there and watch all the different foods go by on the conveyor belt next to your table, then grab whatever you want. Alternatively you can press the call button on the table and order something. This itself comes on the conveyor belt on a marked dish so that no one can grab your goodies before it gets to you. If you order it you do need to be able to do it in Japanese; I know I said both methods were easy, but I think that pushing a button does indeed fall into that easy category.

As most of the plates were 105 yen each (and by that I mean I hardly saw any that were any more than that … maybe one or two), not only was it an inexpensive way to try lots of different styles of food you’d not normally get to try, it was also very easy to keep track of your spending. After chowing down on a plate’s food you stack it at the end of the table. If you’re with a group and want to pay seperately, you just have to stack your plates individually. Feeling full at 7 plates I called it a day. Don’t get me wrong, the plates are not massive, like our dinner plates back home, but 7 plates more than qualified as a good meal.

But why bring up Mango? Well, when the food comes down on the conveyor belt there is (normally) a sign in front of it saying what it is. At numerous times throughout the night a mango pudding came around (an ACTUAL mango pudding). Seeing the sign for this had us in stitches, and many bad jokes about mangoes were told, including how we’d always munch on a mango during the summer!

Last night whilst on the internet I noticed something. Staring at an empty beer can I took a piece of crappy plastic and starting hitting the two together. Unsurprisingly it made a noise. I then took the plastic, put it between my fingers and started swirling it like a mini electric-fan. The beer can was then introduced to this whirlingness and a continuous clacking sound came about. Yeah, once again no big surprise. However, then cogs in my head started whirring, and I started to remember being young, making similar annoyingly noisy things.

From when I was a kid I’d remember annoying the hell out of people by constantly doing things that I’d just learned, practicing it and getting it down to a tea … before getting told off for being an irritating buggar. Anyway, it came to me that i could perhaps use this inspiration in learning my grammar and use whatever grammar point learned as much as I possibly could.

That’s what I did today.

Yes, I was annoying, yes I wasn’t making much sense to the context of conversations, and yes I did confuse many Japanese people (and some of the upper-group exhange students). However, yes I was remembering the grammar, yes I learned how to use it better from friends correcting me, and yes it was funny for all of us.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I was doing:

Person A: “I went shopping at the weekend and it was fun.”
Darlo: “So in other words, you mean to say that apples are delicious.”
Person A: “Um … well, we did buy apples yes. And after that we went to the cinema.”
Darlo: “So in other words, you mean to say that Person B has become better at playing tennis.”
Person A: ” …… “