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| Apaato ni (or, in the apartment) |
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| These are some pictures of my apartment here in Japan (duh). It's actually a nice size for a single person, and I like it quite a bit. I have "two medium sized rooms" (more on those later), a kitchen, and a washroom which contains my shower/bath, washer and non-kitchen sink (the toilet is in it's own little closet-like room). |
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| Living Room and Bedroom |
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My "two medium sized rooms" are my living room and my bedroom. They are seperated by four sliding panels on parallel tracks between the rooms. Each room is 9x12 feet, made up of six 3x6 foot tatami (woven) mats.
This is my living room (though the only real difference is where my bed is). That low table in the picture on the left is called a kotatsu, and it is a very cool invention. Attached to the bottom of it is a heater. You're supposed to put a blanket over the table, plug it in, and then you can sit at it with your feet/legs under the blanket and they'll keep warm. I haven't had to use it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. On the right, you can see my cool shoji, or rice paper screens--they make for some very cool lighting in the morning and at sunset, as the light is filtered through. |
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| Below are a couple of shots of my bedroom. Again, you can see some shoji screens, and you can also see my "bed," if you want to call it that (it's basically just a cot, but it's okay). I don't know what that red-ish thing is, it was left here by my predecessor, and I just never bothered to take it down. And yes, those are my bagpipes at the foot of my bed there. I have played them once so far, for a culture exchange day thing that one of my schools had, but I'm not so sure they went down so well. |
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| Here are a couple of shots to highlight the four panels seperating my rooms. They're on two tracks, so I can make any combination withing that one restriction. I can also remove them, if I want, and open up the two rooms completely for one 12x18 foot room. |
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This is just to show you the two rooms blending together. Another handy feature of those panels is that they make it really easy to get behind the TV to plug things in! |
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| Now check out the rest of my apartment! |
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