Love Hotel Bust

So, since Friday was a holiday for me and Steve, but not for Sam, and since my visiting parents were still in Kyoto, we thought we would round out our Japan experience by checking out a Love Hotel.

We had a light breakfast and wandered off to love hotel hill in Shibuya, all a-giggle and ready for some fun...

It was cute wandering around an area populated almost entirely (and sparsely populated, at that) by couples - many of them holding hands, which isn't all that common here.

Most of the love hotels are pretty nondescript - you enter through a well-shaded and walled entrance into a tiny lobby - most of which had big light-boards with pictures of all of the rooms - if the picture was lit up, the room was available.

We must have wandered into at least 20 love hotels, searching for the perfect theme room. Or, eventually, any theme room at all - and came to several conclusions:

1. Friday morning at 10 am is an incredibly popular time to have sex in Tokyo - most of the rooms in most of the hotels were booked.

2. Contrary to everything I have heard, there are very few "theme" rooms in love hotels - we only saw one (fairly unimpressive - a couple of desultory chains attached to the wall) s&m room, and not a single hello kitty room - although more than a couple did have karaoke included. Oh, and some had hot tubs, but the thought of (as Steve put it) "stewing in other people's juices" somehow didn't invoke the right reactions...

3. People must really not have anywhere else to have sex in Tokyo - these rooms were, on the whole, terrible. Depressing, small, and the lobbies of the hotels all smelled sort of sad and old. If I wanted to have sex in a depressing, characterless room, I would do so at home, surrounded by our foreign affairs furniture and putty-coloured drapes. I certainly wouldn't pay 30-40 dollars to fulfill my "trailer park meets Sears catalogue" fantasies - even if I had them...

So much for kinky, illicit Friday morning sex...

We had coffee and a croissant instead. That's what 19 years together will do for you.