The Love Hotel

Love hotels are places, mostly in Asia, where people go to have sex. Often, entrances to these places are discreet, and you don't even have to interact with the front-desk staff; you select the room you want from a bunch of pictures on a wall, push a button, pay a machine (hourly stay or nightly stay), and your key is dispensed. Some rooms have themes, like the Hello Kitty bondage room, or maybe a castle theme, stuff like that.

Love hotels are often associated with Japan, and since we were going to Japan for a week, I thought it would be an interesting cultural experience - and funny - if I booked a room at a love hotel for us. I decided not to, though, because that would be disgusting and weird.

And then I accidentally did.

The day before we left, I found out that there was a mixup with reservations, and we needed a room for one night. I found a place online in the right price range without paying too much attention to the details. There were a few pictures, it looked fine. Anyway, we'd be leaving in the morning - what's the worst that could happen?

This?

Our taxi driver had trouble finding the hotel. When we finally got there, we were already kind of confused and upset, because either we'd just paid $100 for a 30-minute taxi ride or the airport money exchange service hadn't given us the correct amount of money. (We had just paid $100 for a 30-minute taxi ride.) And apparently the taxi driver had dropped us off at the back door of the hotel?

We went in. The lobby was a tiny room with a low ceiling. There was a display case on our right full of lingerie and what appeared to be a wide selection of lubricants, and, on our left, no one at the front desk. We called out a few times, and a heavy girl in her teens who looked like she needed a shower came out to help us. "Check in?" I said, and gave her my receipt printout from Expedia. She smiled and nodded and pointed to a sign on the desk asking whether we'd be paying by cash or credit. I pointed to the paper, where it said something about how we'd already paid. I don't think she was used to getting Expedia reservations, she couldn't read English, and since our phone didn't work in Japan, I couldn't really do anything. She got out her phone and typed into a translator, "Payment method?" I shook my head and said, "We paid online." She didn't understand. I smiled apologetically and held out my hand for her phone, so I could type in, "We already paid online," and pointed at the paper again. She smiled and held up a finger for "one minute" and made a phone call. While she was on the phone, I looked at the products in the display case and inspected the wall with the glowing pictures and buttons. A couple had just come in and quickly selected a room, gotten a key from somewhere, and left in the elevator.

Considering the display case, the room-selection wall, and the "back door," we had begun to become suspicious that we were in a love hotel.

She hung up, typed, "I understand," and gave us our key. We stuffed ourselves into the extremely small elevator and went upstairs. The hallway looked clean, like something from a normal hotel. When we got to the room, we - or I, anyway - were still stressed over not knowing if we'd gotten the right amount of money from the airport, about having no access to the internet to figure that out, and about having apparently actually reserved a room for us in a love hotel, so I was completely not in the mood to be excited by the features of our room instead of just really grossed out.

The room had a little foyer with a safe. Beyond the foyer was the sitting room, with a steep, narrow-stepped staircase leading to the bedroom. That was cool; we'd never stayed in a room with two floors before. The staircase was decorated with some pictures and a fake window.

The living room, which somewhere had speakers playing a soft, relaxing, repetitive tune of like ten notes, featured a change machine, a slot machine, a lingerie & lubricant vending machine, and a karaoke machine. And a glued-down statue of a cockatoo.

Attached to the sitting room was a vanity area with a sink and mirror. Beyond that was a small, warm room with a toilet in it. (The room, it turned out, was warm because it had been heated by the toilet seat; the seat had a console full of buttons to control the two different types of sprays and the heat. A warm toilet seat feels like someone was sitting there for an hour before it was your turn. For some reason, heated seats are really common in Japan.) There was another room off the vanity area containing a shower, a big jetted tub, a small television, and a decorative shop window thing with a weird display of Christmas tree lights and fake roses. At the flip of a switch, the room would go from normal lighting to a blue overhead with lighting on the fake rose display. So romantic.

Also in the bathroom was a scary thing on the wall, controlled by a dial near the lightswitches, that made steam.

And this sign illustrating how to operate a shower attachment which appeared to no longer be in there.

And this vaguely creepy bathing seat which I think is supposed to accommodate testicles.

Upstairs, in our bedroom, was another TV with another karaoke machine. There were two remote controls; one allowed you to control the projector installed above the bed which projected whatever was on the TV onto the wall across from the bed. At the head of the bed there was a control panel with numbered buttons. Each button represented a different lighting scheme for our lodgings, both upstairs and downstairs. Near the control panel was a "personal massager" which was plugged in somewhere, some complimentary condoms, tissues, the phone, normal hotel room stuff. Attached to the ceiling of the room was a color-changing LED disco ball thing.

I would have a picture of the projector in action, but about six of the ten channels on the TV were...not...good...for me to take pictures of and put on here.

Oh, the outside:

And the hotel-logo boards in the parking lot you to use cover your license plate so no one knows it's you:

So, that was the love hotel. My accident with the reservations led to one of the most bizarre experiences we've had yet. And once I calmed down and got over the impulse to disinfect the room - it actually looked as clean as most places we've stayed, and a lot cleaner than some - we made the best of it!