On the first day I checked in, I received the strangest check-in package ever: the key to my room, a local area map and also a banana. Now I have stayed in many, many places, but never have I received a banana as a welcome gift.
The room I stayed in employed a sliding door. The shower is outside my room, so I have to lock the door and then make my way to the shower. One night after my shower, I make my way back to my room and find the door jammed. So I explain to the owner that I can't open the door, to which she gesticulates and rambles on in Japanese I don't understand, like it were my fault. And then she promptly hands me a butter knife.
So I gathered from her hand gestures that I was to use the butter knife to somehow jiggle the lock to get the door open. So for the next hour I am outside my room meddling with the door, and seriously contemplating taking the door down (this is entirely possible - the door is quite flimsy).
Before I do, however, the old lady appears with a mattress in hand, and indicates that I can sleep in the doorway outside my room for tonight. How about that, I pay good money to sleep in a hotel hallway...Thankfully, it was at this point she actually looked at the door, and through some black magic with the butter knife manages to get the thing open. Thereafter, she promptly tells me not to lock the door any more, and conficates my key. So now I had a room; I just couldn't lock it.
It gets better. So I decide to extend my stay in Kyoto, and ask the old dame if I could do so. She mumbles something about needing to change to another room, which was bigger and had television and air-con and something else I didn't understand. I said fine, and left it at that.
Turns out that the something else was that the room was also used for spare bedding. So now I am sleeping in the utility room that is stacked to the ceiling with mattresses. I wonder what else she will throw my way.
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