What's going on YouTube? It's Jim from My Tiny Atlas. In this video we'll be
touring our Kyoto Airbnb but be sure to watch all the way to the end to catch
all of our travel tips and hacks and even a way to get $45 off your first
Airbnb booking so let's go fam!
Just a minute.
Oh hey guys. Come on right in. Me and Lesli wanted to show you what a typical Airbnb
looks like in Japan. But first take off your shoes.
So typically you're gonna take off your shoes before you come in the house.
Now as you can see there's not much room to walk in here. If I have even a little
bit of a wider shoulders, I don't think I'd be able to fit in the door. "You are
fake news"
So the first stop here is we have is our trusty hot water making
machine. It's a boiler obviously and this thing is amazing, a little bit of
hot water goes a long way. Me and Leslie we can take showers all
day and not run out of hot water. Right here is a standard kitchen. It's small
but it gets the job done. So you got your heating range right here and the sink and
a lot of times it will come with little utensils and cooking tools and that's
pretty amazing because a lot of people have dietary conditions where they can't
eat certain things like we may be vegan or they may be gluten allergy or they
may need Halal or kosher food so they can't eat a lot of stuff here in Japan. So to
have the option to cook is an amazing thing in an Airbnb. Not every Airbnb
comes with it but this one did. If you follow me to the bedroom.
This is where the magic happens or uhmm yeah ... this is where we just come here to sleep
but anyways this is a pretty standard bedroom in Japan. You can see that it's
quite small. It's a studio apartment pretty much. There's two beds and barely
any room to work with. If you book an Airbnb in Japan. You'll find that a lot
of places only allow for two people and that's not because they're trying to
maximize the profit or anything like that it's just that look at the space.
You're not gonna have any chance to move around if you have more than two
people in here. I can't even imagine what the shower situation in the area is gonna be like
if you have five or six people. I don't even know how you guys would even figure that
out. But yeah so we got the beds here. To be honest we've been here for a few days
now and it didn't look like this five minutes ago me and Lesli had to run
around clean everything because it was an absolute disaster and you know how
girls are with their makeup. But props to this Airbnb because their pillow
and the mattress is amazing, we slept like angels. It's got this memory foam
mattress on top and I don't know what in these blankets but cause I want to take them
home because they're damn warm. Me especially coming from Canada, I want to
feel like home. So I blast the AC which in turn has me
sleeping in the blankets to warm up. We've had a really comfortable time staying
here. Kudos to the Airbnb hosts, for sure. If you follow me up out here, so a lot
of times they don't come with a balcony and this one did but it looks
like this is specifically for you to be able to dry your clothes. Not that you're
gonna be able to any of that right now cause it's been raining for the
last couple of days. This is a pretty standard like you have little coffee
tables. I don't know if you want to drink coffee in the morning here but I love
the Japanese coffee so I'm always out the door. Essential thing is is a power
bar. This is key. This is such a lifesaver because most of the times you
have devices and especially if you're trying to charge your camera, your cell
phone, your external batteries and the pocket Wi-Fi. You're gonna run out a room pretty
quick. And if you take a look at our closet here. It looks kind of sad I pressed
these two shirts when I got here and I didn't want to get wrinkles so they're not
in the bag. But it looks. There's nothing even in here so it's pretty standard.
If you look over here, they got the kettle pot, microwave and a
mini-fridge. That's pretty standard as well. Kettle pot if you want to grab a
bowl of cup noodle and you want a midnight snack or something like that you can
definitely go ahead and do that. Microwave - microwave some food and if
you got any leftovers from your favorite restaurant that you visited earlier you
can put them in here. Most of times they are not going to get any bigger than
this so don't be expecting to bring on three bags of groceries or anything like that
because I mean just look at the space there's barely anything any room
to put anything in. So if you have a fridge like this and it's running all
night you're not gonna be able to sleep through the night.Oh yeah so come on here.
I'll show you the bathroom, this is pretty cool. We like this.
If you look inside this is what a standard Japanese bathroom would look
like. You'll notice that there's no shower curtains, there's water all over the
floor because I just showered.
Japanese people shower and let the water drip on the floor. They don't care about
anything like that because there's a drain right there, that's super handy so if you
follow me to the bathroom. I mean the toilet. This is handy because we like
that this is separated from this because I could be doing my business over here
and Leslie could do whatever she's doing over here. One cool thing about this
toilet is that if you'll notice that it's got a sink on the top of the toilet.
I never realized what it was for to till about my last day on my last trip in
Japan and what this is for is when you flush.
You'll notice that the water comes out right there. There you got the towel
right? So if you have to go do a midnight tinkle, you don't want to be going and
turning on the water here or out here and waking up everybody you can just
do a light rinse and then wipe up, turn off the lights and you're good to go.
Oh and I forgot to mention this one one little asset that's in our Airbnb.
It''s a washing machine. This is super convenient for guys that are traveling
for long periods of time because you're not going to want to stuff your old
sweaty smelly clothes into your baggage and have everything smelling like your
stinky underwear right. So put that in there and do the wash, dry it out there and
that's good to go. Our Airbnb is a typical room that you'd
get for about $50 Canadian. Any higher than that you can you actually get maybe
three or four beds and maybe an actual living room where you can hang
out and rest. But yeah this is pretty standard and for an Airbnb. A lot of the
times we found that they're generally pretty clean. This one especially because
we read the reviews right. We did our research, we read the reviews, cleanliness
for me and Leslie is a huge factor because for us to stay in some place and sleep
at night and shower and know that it's not going to be clean we're not going to
feel comfortable at all and it's just gonna make the rest of the travel not that
great. Another factor that we wanted to discuss was the location. "And I'm here to
talk to you about the l-word.
location, location, location, location"
Location was key in how we decided the Airbnb this time because we learn from
last time when we stayed in Kyoto, we were half an hour out of the central
town and we just did not have a good time. Especially the public
transportation might not be up to par in Kyoto there's only mostly buses which
took a really long time and you can hardly find a seat and subway system was
very limited on destination that they'll go to. Being in the heart of Gion district
where we are right now. We had the most amazing time, walking
around, we can walk down the river, we can walk for ten minutes and find the most
amazing traditional food that was a great factor for us. You know when you
travel, you don't want to be working too hard to get to places that you want to.
You want to make it easy, you want to make it convenient, you want to make it
comfortable. And honestly, I want to thank the Airbnb hosts at this place for
having such an amazing location because really we've stayed at Airbnbs where it
was not up to par where it was absolutely disgusting, it's so far away and
we pretty much nearly hated the Airbnb part of it. As a tip, there's a referral code
and whenever you sign up for an Airbnb account and you can send that to your
friends and you can go ahead and send it to your mom, send it to your dad, uncle, aunt and
whoever. And if they do end up using it then you get $50 discount voucher towards
your account. And me Leslie has been taking advantage of that quite a bit.
Especially if you're staying in some place like this, that's equivalent to having
one night free and who doesn't like free stuff. But definitely we highly
recommend Airbnb in general. Especially in Kyoto we did find that the hotels
were ridiculously expensive and you'll find that that's the case in a lot of
parts of Japan as well and for us to be able to it
spend only about a third of what we're gonna spend at a hotel and stay at some
place where you know realistically we're only here to sleep so we're not gonna
need anything fancy. Yeah we don't have valet service, we don't have
bellboys and all that stuff but we can manage on our own and I think that's a
great thing with Airbnb in general and highly recommended. So thanks for joining
us on our Airbnb tour. I hope you guys like what you guys saw and gives you
guys a pretty good understanding of what an Airbnb is like in Japan. We're
sharing our knowledge with you guys, hopefully you guys don't make the same
mistakes and you guys can take the tips that we put in this video. If you guys
want to check out the Airbnb that we stayed up, we'll put the link down below
and yeah join us for the next video guys!