This is the control for the water heater. You turn it on when you want to use warm water and turn it off when you're done. It takes very little time for the water to warm up. It took longer for the shower to get warm in our apartment in Boston or my apartment in Santa Monica than it does here. I think this is a great idea for saving energy.
As with the water heater control, many of the interfaces are less intuitive and simple than interfaces in the US. The gray buttons say "maruku" and "atsuku", which basically mean hot and cold. I'm surprised that it doesn't just have up and down arrows.
This is probably the most used control in the house. It's the toilet control. I would not have imagined that using a toilet would be so complex. Luckily, I knew the kanji on the top before I got here; "big" and "small". The rest is pretty easy to figure out. It's nice to be in a country where bidets are commonly used. I just never expected them to be electronically controlled.
This is one of the controls I have yet to figure out. I don't even really know exactly what it does. The buttons on the right are light switches, and I can clearly see some timer buttons and indicators, but I don't know what they time. Maybe one day I'll be bored enough to try this guy out. It's outside of the shower room, so I hope it has some special surprised in store.
This is apparently our washer and dryer. I have not attempted to use this one out either. I'm still recovering from learning to use the rice cooker, so I'll have to leave this one to another day. Heather had someone at work explain to her how to use it, so at least one of us knows. Supposedly, it weighs your clothes and tells you how much detergent you need. I hope it also has a smell-o-meter, otherwise, I'm going to have to do some calculations of my own; mostly multiplication.
2 comments:
Hey Chris,
The blog is a nice idea and the humorous anecdotes are appreciated and made me laugh. It's nice to have such a good sense of what's going on in your lives over there in the far east. All the best to you and Heather as you become more acclimated to Japan and marriage. By the way, most Japanese golfers have never played on a golf course and only play virtual golf or go to driving ranges due to the tremendous expense involved with actual courses. Virtual golf is actually quite fun and realistic. I do it regularly here during our frigid, snowy Montreal winters.
Warm Regards, Tim
I'm still amazed at how much golf equipment there was at an electronics store. It was 70% of an entire floor out of about 6 floors. It does make sense that they play virtual golf. Tokyo has an enormous metropolitan area and I didn't see any golf courses nearby on google maps. It looks like you have to travel quite a ways to even get to a real course, which I'm sure is still very expensive.
I'm glad you like the blog. The more people that read it, the more worthwhile it is. I'll just have to try harder to do posts about things OUTSIDE of the apartment. I can tend not to get out of here that much, due to work.
Love to you, Patti, and Liam
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