Puppy Hotel is not for Puppies

While wandering through some of the pedestrian alleys in Osaka, we saw this hotel down the hill that had lots of little puppy statues on the outside.

A hotel with puppie statues? Yep!

I had heard that in ultra urban areas, people will really pander their pets. I had also heard of pet-coops were people could share the joy and care of a pet - so I wondered if this was one of those places.

Was the hotel for puppies? Nope!

Outside the hotel, there were pictures of the rooms. All modern, people sized rooms. One that showcased a room with a built in hot tub in a gazebo style bathroom. But the most interesting part is that the prices were for either "Rest" or "Stay". Haha. We had found a love hotel. "Rest" is for short love. Stay is for, presumably, long love. And the puppies are, obviously, for puppy love.

Being the curious types we decided to check out the super-deluxe, multi floored, hot-tub in the gazebo, penthouse room. We went in.

There was no one inside the lobby. There was a computer and a touch screen, so I pressed the buttons until I got a piece of paper that came out: "601" and some japanese writing. So we had just made our reservation....

We walked up the stairs and into the room where there was a vending machine. Being Japan - where everything is vending machines (Many ramen restaurants work by you buying a ticket from a vending machine on the outside, and then you hand the people inside the ticket it prints) - the vending machine is presumably where we were to pay.

So we tried to pay. Another thing is that Japanese vending machines (like the subway ones anyway) want money before they awaken. So I put in 1000 yen ($10) and pressed the buttons. The machine then asked for 26700 more yen! What???? $267 more dollars? Ok, this was a bit more than we wanted to pay.

The idea was just to check out the place and the culture not to have secret expensive getaway. $267 was a bit out of our budget. So we were going to leave. $10 was lost but we had the experience.

But the machine: Locked...down...the...doors.

What I mean is that we were completely trapped in this room. There was no way out of the room, and so far no human contact at all. All we had was a locked door and a machine asking for $267 more dollars.

It can be tense when you are locked in a Japanese room with no way out and a machine wanting alot more money than you intended.

We pressed all of the buttons over and over and about 15 minutes later the machine gave us the option to pay $35 dollars. We paid it. The machine unlocked the door.

So, like what did we buy for the now $45 dollars? Was the room ours? Was that it? What were we supposed to do now???

While discussing this, the machine >dutifully< LOCKED...US...IN...AGAIN!

Were we smart to get locked into a room twice? Costing $10, now $45, with a machine hungry for $267?

It might not seem that smart of us to have got locked into this room twice. But we did spend $45 dollars at this point so I >assumed< we must have had bought >something<. We just weren't sure what.

Fortunately at this point the phone in the room rang (I had poked at the phone before, but it didn't make sense before). The voice on the other side said: "You ALREADY PAID". I said, "Yes I paid. We wanted to just buy Rest but the machine wanted $267 dollars".

He said: "just dial 9 in an hour and we'll let you out."

So clearly, now, we realized that it is normal for the machine to lock you in the room, and then you are supposed to pay when you leave and there is a short grace period before it locks you into the room again. This info was not in our guide book.

So, eventually, we called the 9 and got them to let us out. Because this wasn't the normal way, we ended up talking to two maids though the door and one person on the phone to get the door unlocked. They did not know how to do this exactly. The irony to this whole situation is that these systems are specifically setup so that you see 0 people when going into and out of these love nests.

In fact, there are two video displays which show the outside street so you can see who is on the street to decide when to make your discreet exit.

For us, though, on this mission, we did learned new things but got like 1/10 for being "discreet".