My Apartment

25/10/07

Introducing to you my apartment; it costs us 50,000 yen per month to rent it, which means RM1, 500! And this doesn’t include the furniture and the bills. Thanks to Prof Okuda and his family, we need not spend too much on the furniture. But then there are still quite a lot need to buy.

We are staying at the right corner, ground floor. There’s two rooms, equal in size I think. You can have a clearer picture of how it is like with the picture and layout of the house.

If you look at the layout, you'll find that the doors are all opening outwards. The corridor is quite narrow, so when you open two doors or even three doors, the doors will be knocking together. The same goes to the toilet and washroom doors. So it's weird for me.

This is our room, that's the only room that you can go through to the balcony, and the only room attached with an air con, which also serves as the heater. All the three doors of this room are sliding doors.

We have a balcony outside our room to dry our clothes under the sun. One lucky thing is that it's always facing the sun no matter morning or afternoon. But though the sun may be shinning bright, your clothes would not dry fast as the wind is cool still. It takes a few days to have the clothes to get dry.

This is the view from my apartment. You can see that's cemetry just opposite our apartment. For Japanese, they believe that their ancestors protects them, so they are not afraid. Actually it's also a common scene here.

I don't know if every house in Japan has a bath tub. But Funato san told us that Japanese has this practice of sharing the bath tub water in a family. They will soak themselves in the warm water for about 10 minutes after taking shower. Then the person will cover the bath tub (i don't know what they call it) so that the water can keep warm for the next person to use. Otaka san told me we must take bath instead of taking shower so that your body can be stronger and warmer. oh well, unless there's really such a need, otherwise we don't wanna waste water like that.

Coming out from the bathroom that's our washing machine and sink. It's quite narrow so I couldn't take a whole picture of it.

The water bill here is very expensive, as the government treated the water for you, you can drink directly from the tab. But that is not all. You have to pay extra 50% for the water you use, meaning multiply the amount of water you use with 1.5, that is your water bill. Why 50%? The extra money is for the government to treat the wastage.

That is the toilet with it's 'clothes' on. Actually it's very common here but not for us. Ha ha... I feel sakai most of the time. You can see there's a tab above which you can wash your hands there before the water goes into the toilet for flushing.

This is what you won't see in Msia: people simply leave their things outside of the house and nobody will take it. These two toy cars outside of our apartment, owned by the little boy next door. We often meet the mother playing with the son outside of the house.