Cultual Note

So something that I haven't mentioned before are my trials and tribulations with the hotel bathroom. At the hostel, there was a standard shower stall set up. The bathroom here at the hotel looks pretty Western: toilet and shower in same room, deep bathtub and handheld shower head with two hook positions, one high and one low. The bathtub has a shower curtain.

The first night I took a shower, I had the showerhead at the high position, because I couldn't get my head under it at the low position. Unfortunately, since I'm blind without my glasses, I didn't realize that the water was hitting the back wall of the shower - and not falling into the tub! Because of the tub design, there was actually a lip that the water was catching on, causing the water to drip all over the floor. Being totally blind without my glasses, it took me a while to notice. When I realized it, I moved the showerhead to the lower position, but not before my pants got totally soaked from where I had left them on the floor.

Fast forward to night two. Now on the lower position, I thought everything was fine and dandy until I realized that unless the shower head was positioned exactly right, it STILL dripped water all over the floor! How stupid was the person who designed this shower??

EXCEPT, then I did some reading. And..it turns out you're supposed to flood the floor! The Japanese take a shower first before getting into a bath to soak. I knew this was true for public baths, but it turns out to be true for private baths as well. There's a drain in the floor of the bathroom specifically for this purpose, and the floor is recessed by an inch compared with the floor outside the bathroom (and here I thought the floor dried fast after I flooded it because of all the towels I had thrown down). The hotel bathroom IS oddly designed, since in a traditional bathroom you would never have the toilet in the same room as the shower.

Anyway, that was my cultural lesson of the day.