Houseshares

So I told you that the size of the kitchens in the private apartments made me consider house shares.

The first room I looked at was in a 6LDK house share in Ogikubo. One of my favourite areas of Tokyo. This guy came and met me and he and I would be the only foreigners in the house - the others were Japanese. When I was looking at the ad, it said the house was a 5 min walk from the eki and and room was 12 tatami mats. That's a massive room and why I decided to go and take a look at it.

Bollocks - the house was a 15min walk and no one had bothered to tell me that the 12 mat room had gone. So I ended up being shown 5.5mat room. It wasn't actually that bad but if I had known, I wouldn't have bothered wasting my time going to look at it. The kitchen was amazing but there was only one bathroom. Gross. And all the housemates were raving about how their schedules don't overlap and it works out really well. Yeah right!

So there's always a big risk going into a houseshare with people you don't know. The state of the house tells you a lot about the people that live there. Sticky surfaces, butter and milk left out, and my pet hate - a buttered knife left on the counter.

Bye bye!

The second place was the one I ended up taking. But I'll tell you about that in a separate entry!

The third one was another 6LDK house. This was an 8 tatami room and really nice. I just hated the rest of the house. It was too far from the eki and I would be sharing with 5 Japanese guys. Some were excited about having a foreigner in the house and some looked petrified. The house was a complete mess and really dark. The most awesome thing about it was this massive rooftop terrace that just screamed BBQ party!

To be continued.....