Today we mostly sat around waiting for our laundry at the inn and watching television. You see, the washer/ dryer combination at the inn apparently takes a whopping 4-5 hours to finish. Yes, you heard that correctly: 4-5 hours to get washed, and in the same silver vestibule get dried. Had we known about this going in we may have looked elsewhere to wash our days-old stinking clothes. But alas, we ventured in blind, and after getting the tutorial on what buttons did what by the inn manager, we poured in the detergent and shoved our clothes in and started her up.
The door locked with resounding click and then a sharp snap, and then the vestibule started to rotate, “sensing” the load. Water poured in and everything seemed normal and fine, like any other washing machine we have ever used, until the time remaining light blinked on and we stared into the blinking LED lights in utter astonishment.
3:30 it blinked, orange text on an obsidian background. 3 hours and 30 minutes. We were shocked. It was 3:45 in the afternoon and we had assumed everything would take about an hour and a half and then we would go back out into the city to find a restaurant that either had pictures of the food or a menue in English. But, it seemed fate had other plans, and instead of pointing at food we thought we might like to eat, we spent the evening in our inn-issued house robes watching Amazon Prime on the smartphone and eating instant noodles for dinner from the Family Mart across the street.
It would help to have a second pair of clothes in situations like this. If we did, none of this would be a problem. But instead, every piece of clothing we owned was on a 300 minute joy ride to becoming so fricking clean you would think we just picked them up from the hypothetical outfitter down street.
All of this was perfectly fine, however. Because, outside, the sky was unleashing a furious dumping of water all over beautiful Kyoto. It was like a monsoon out there. We could hear the rain pounding everything outside and the cars sloshing right through it. A quick weather check indicated the area was expecting to get almost 3 inches of rain. The downpour started at noon and wasn’t supposed lighten up until the next morning. The fact that the world was drowning itself completely erased the sting of having to wait over 18,000 seconds to wash a few items of clothing.
The day was not a complete bust, though. Not only did I successfully use the “oshiri” function on the inn toilet by accident, which shoots a stream of warm water into your butt hole after taking a number two, we went to a cool hand craft mart in the morning and followed that up with some traditional tea at a recommended tea shop. So, the day wasn’t a complete wash, just a part of it.
After waiting the 3 hours and 30 minutes we checked on the laundry and found that there was still an hour remaining. Apparently time moved much more slowly on the machine than in reality. It didn’t matter much. We tried opening the door to shut it off, surely everything had to be dry by then, but the door wouldn’t open. We turned it off and then back on and still it remained locked. We had no choice but to wait out the timer, and by 9:15, over 5 hours since turning the damn thing on, our clothes were ready.
And the wait was worth it. It’s the cleanest my clothes have been in a long time. I couldn’t even smell BO anymore in the armpits of my adventure shirt. I was like a new man, a super tourist, ready to get back out there in Japan and point at pictures of food I thought I might like to eat, and ride the bullet train and eat matcha ice cream and take too many pictures.
I was ready for tomorrow, and the only thing I had to do was wait to get there. 
