Guest House Illias

OK, Last day I left off with my first breakfast in Kyoto. When we were done with that we had a mission to find the apartment or "Guest House" that we reserved in advance. Most of the guest houses we found online were very expensive but one stuck out as being a significantly lower price than all the rest. Honestly, we didn't care if we were in a roach infested motel for the two weeks. The price was right and I'll explain why it was necessary. The deal was great. It cost the both of us 29000 Yen (¥) which is about $340 Canadian. We needed a base of operations from which we could do everything we needed to do. Perhaps, two weeks was too short to do everything but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Before I say what we found. Let me explain what the dilemma was.

In order to get a job many steps need to be done before hand. First of all, all foreigners (Gaigin) must apply for an Alien Registration Card (The application for such a card was entirely in Japanese and no one at the office spoke English..Fun). In order to get the Alien Registration Card you needed an address that they can send it to. In order to get a place to stay you needed a bank account, which of course you needed an Alien Registration Card to get. If you want me to make it even more complicated, to get a place to stay is nearly impossible without a cell phone and you need a bank account to get that. And please keep in mind once again that the cell phone reps, bank tellers and most people who will rent out appartments DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH. Once again, Neither I nor Helene speak Japanese, at least not enough to get anything we needed done properly.

So what to do in this screwed up world of contradictions, we rented an apartment (Guest House Illias) and immediately went to get our Alien Registration Card using our temporary address. Unfortunately, we arrived on Silver Week, which is a national holiday week (sort of, only 3 days.). It turns out that this week two holidays fell on the Japanese calender fell one day apart from each other and the government decided to give the people the day in between off as well. This only happens once every 8 years, I think. They called it Silver Week because every year they do have a national week off, which is called Golden Week. The name definitely keeps up with the Asian stereotypes.

Thus, we couldn't get anything done in any manner until the following Thursday September 24th. This was of course good and bad. Good since we could do some exploring and bad because we couldn't do anything without those damn cards.

Alright, I think I've digressed enough. What did the apartment look like? We got a ride from a really nice Japanese man from our hostel to the guest house. It was located in the Gion neighborhood. Now we didn't actually realise what kind of neighborhood Gion was until about 3 days later. It turns out Gion is the center of Kyoto for Bars, Clubs, Restaurants and Adult Entertainment. You wouldn't be able to tell by looking at it, at least not at first. Not to say it was loud or anything like that. Surprisingly it was very quiet. Everything was very well contained indoors. The point is, we were in the center of Kyoto, well within walking distance of most things cool.

The apartment was nestled on the 5th floor of a very small building. It was one of two apartments on this floor. We didn't have a shower. That was located on the 7th floor and honestly I'm not sure how hygienic it was. I don't have a picture of it, so I'll leave that to the imagination. The first thing that we noticed about our apartment was the smell. It came from the toilet area. Yeah, just by looking at the picture on the right you can see the problem. I have no idea what kind of balancing act I was suppose to use with the traditional toilet, but for me it was fine because a western style toilet was available on the 7th floor. Helene on the other hand could not run upstairs every time she had to pee. Plus entering this thing was just an awful experience not only because of the smell but the sound of the fan was so loud that it would wake up anyone in the next room. You would think that the fan worked well because of how loud it was. It didn't.

The layout of the place was funny. Couches on the side. A bed and a couch that turned into a bed. Both were too short for me, my legs stuck out. In addition it had, a small sink and a gas element with no gas. We eventually called them (once we figured out how the phones worked) and complained that the gas didn't work on the stove but that ended up going nowhere. The gas also heated the hot water, so we didn't have that either (eventually we called and complained that the shower had no hot water either and they fixed that). The nice man that drove us to the apartment offered us some instant coffee. How we were suppose to make it was a question that I asked everyday. I suppose we were suppose to use the microwave to heat the water but that never made good coffee (still not sure how healthy that was). We also had a bar fridge.

I before I get to the punchline of this story I wanted to say one more thing about this apartment. We didn't have a key to it. To both the apartment and the shower we had a combination lock. There was a lock on the door with a combination of 4 letters in order to get into the apartment. I've seen that on bikes but doors?

I've mentioned that we were in the bar district. There were more bars per square inch then I've ever seen before. If you look at the pictures above you'll see that there are a lot of signs everywhere. How can you fit so many bars into such a small area. Well I'm not sure of the liqueur laws in this country but it seems that anyone could open a their own bar and sell booze to anyone willing to buy it. The areas are small and cozy. Smoking is allowed indoors. I suppose a place where you can show up with your buddies and take over for the night. Most bars in this area turned out to only hold about 20 people. Some of these bars are also hostess bars. Which I will write about once I get more info about it. I think you pay girls to flirt with you while you drink. But I'm not sure.

Finally the end of the story where all the clues that I've laid out earlier all culminate into one final joke. If you look at this picture what you will see is a place called BABES on the 5th floor. I'm pretty sure that the apartment across from us was not a bar because I saw a single mom coming out of there a few times and heard a kid in the corridor. So, I pritty sure that our place was BABES. Once we figured this out we were a little more cautious about locking the doors. Who knows what kind of business occurred there and what kind of clientele it had. If you look at this picture below it is the exact mirror image of what the apartment looked like.
The bed was uncomfortable. It smelt really bad. We couldn't cook anything and the fridge could barley hold breakfast for the following day. No we didn't have wireless. We survived off Cup of Noodle soup and easily microwaveable stuff. Eventually we found hard boiled eggs in the store. This avoided having fried food at the start of the day. My stomach is still complaining from that experience. It was fun because we had to work with what we had. Plus, the microwave wouldn't beep when it was done it would sing a little song. I would also like to add that there was a sign in the shower room that warned users not to shower while doing laundry because "fear of the burn". Yes we had a laundry machine but we had nowhere to dry our clothes nor could we realise how to use the damn things since all the buttons were in Japanese.

One last thing which is up for conversation is this last picture which I took outside our window. I would love to hear what you think it means.
We ended up extending our lovely stay in this apartment for an extra 4 days.