Today, we want to share with you a bit more photos from our neighborhood!
There are many interesting buildings. Do you see a UFO in the below photo!? Well, that is not a UFO but a museum!
There is a monorail running through our neighborhood! In Japan, many people use public transportation, such as trains and buses. Public transportation is running everywhere in Japan that it is a very reliable and convenient way to go to places. And can you believe no one is actually driving this monorail!? It is running all on its own!
These are the views from our balconies! Remember we told you in our last blog post that we have both mountains and the ocean in Kobe? Can you spot a big ship in the second photo??
And today... we would like to invite you to our apartment tour!
We live in a very typical 3-bedroom apartment in Japan.
In Japan, we do not wear shoes inside our house. So, when we enter from our front door, there is this little section called 'genkan' where we take our shoes off and leave them. If you prefer to wear something on your feet inside the house, you can put on this special shoes called slippers that you can wear only inside the house. Here in this photo, Yuki is putting on his shoes at the genkan so we can go to church!
This is Yuki's room... We love furniture from IKEA, so most of our furniture is from IKEA. IKEA is very popular in Japan! Are you guys good at keeping your room neat and tidy!? Do you think Yuki keeps his room clean or is his room very messy!?
We will not show you Yuki's Mom's room, because... her room is actually messier than Yuki's room!!
And as our third bedroom, we have this 'tatami' room. Tatami is a mat that is made of rise straw, and they make up a Japanese-style floor.
Since we do not really use this room, it has become a storage/guest room... That is why you can see all those cardboard boxes and etc..
In this photo, you can also see 'futon,' which is a Japanese-style bed. Many Japanese sleep on bed nowadays, but still, there are many others who sleep on futon. It's a thin mattress that you put directly on the floor. The benefit of it is that you can always fold it and put it away in the closet when you are not using it and make more space during the day.
The door for a tatami room is called 'fusuma,' which is a sliding-door made of wooden frame and some cardboard and papers. As the name suggests, you slide it to open and close.
In Japanese houses, we have a separate bathroom and toilet.
On top of the water tank of the toilet, can you see a faucet? Whenever you flash the toilet, water comes out from this faucet into the water tank, and you can just wash your hands there. It seems like many people from other countries are surprised whenever they see this faucet attached to the water tank in the toilet. What do you guys think about it??
And also in the photo, you can see the slippers used just for the toilet.
This is the bathroom. Japanese bathtubs are very deep. When we sit down in the bathtub, the whole body will be in the bathtub. There is a big space with shower right next to the bathtub. In Japan, we usually wash our body first in this space, and then we get into the bath. We do not change the bath water for each person, but everyone in the family uses the same bath water each night... if it makes any sense! We first clean ourselves outside the bathtub, and we get into the bath to relax for the day.
This is our balcony. Can you guess what those green bars are used for?
In Japan, we do not use the dryer. Instead, we hang our clothes to dry after we wash them. We hang our laundry on those bars in the balcony!
This is our kitchen...
And this is our living room! In Japan, there really is no distinction between living room and dining room. There is one big space that we call living room, and we put a dining table in one section of the living room and we put sofas and TV on the rest of the space.
So, how did you like our apartment tour?? Was it pretty much like your house, or did you find anything that was different and interesting? I hope you guys enjoyed our apartment tour!!
Sayonara until next time!!
We loved your apartment tour! Having the toilet and bathroom separate is very different from us, and the faucet on the toilet was very unique!
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of having a special place to remove your shoes. When we get new carpeting we will probably institute a no-shoes policy for our home.
The kids thought Yuki keeps his room tidy- he has a lot of stuff but it looks like he has places for everything. In our family Audrey keeps her room the tidiest. We recently used the KonMari method to tidy our home, and it was a great way to get rid of a LOT of stuff we didn't need. We still need to work on keeping it tidy on a daily basis, however.
We like IKEA too, but our closest store is pretty far away!
Tyson gave us a great explanation for how the monorail works- he's always loved trains and so he's studied monorails. They're his favorites because they're easy to understand and they go REALLY fast!
You have some beautiful views from your apartment and your neighborhood looks like a fun place to live. We'll do a post soon to show you our home and neighborhood so you can see what it's like for Moppy being with us for the summer.
Thanks!