Guests

My landlady had guests last week – and because she lives in a very small Japanese house, she had them stay overnight with us in, well, the guesthouse. They left in the early afternoon today for Osaka.

Not three hours later we noticed that our toilets were blocked, both of them… Thank goodness my landlady was around and with the help of our usual builder – who came after 6 pm, on a Friday night! – and a lot of running water, we have now at least one fully functioning toilet again.Things like this do happen on occasion of course, but you can imagine my landlady was not entirely pleased.

There were a few other things that made that visit not too pleasant for her, but I am not going to share them here. I can share one of my own experiences with those guests though: When I came down to the bathroom on Monday morning, I noticed – even in that almost brainless state I occupy the first two hours after getting up – that some of my toiletries were gone: shampoo and soap were missing, and somebody had obviously used my hairbrush and face cream. I was glad one of the new guests was there, so I complained; I mean, who else could have done this?

It turned out that her husband had appropriated my stuff because he thought that those were things left behind by former tenants. I’m sorry – what? You come into a shared house, where you know several people are living right now, and the first thing you assume when you enter the bathroom is that the stuff on the shelf is abandoned? I have to give it to him: He was the first one in all my 18 months of living here to have had that glorious idea…

At least they didn’t take much, and when I complained I got everything back. Also, when I checked my kitchen shelf just before, I found two newly abandoned bananas, and we have a large stash of toilet paper. In case of any more geniuses moving in in the future, I have now labelled my basket of toiletries with my name though.