#airbnb

Some of my most cherished memories from Taiwan are just the showers, one of which was a rainfall shower that was the entire bathroom. Another was a massive personal granite tub in our hotel room that filled with hot spring water.

So one year for my beloveds birthday I decided to take them to these caves several hours away. I needed to book a place to stay and found a really fascinating Airbnb that honestly was like the What We Do in the Shadows house. It had a creaky vaguely haunted air while being somehow charming, but the reason I booked it was the bathroom.

Half the room was a shower. It was fully tiled, with six or seven shower heads, no curtain, and so many knobs. I looked at that photo and imagined laying under a stream of several different jets of hot water at once and hit book immediately.

We arrived after a long drive, and explored the very strange attic like room I’d booked us. It was extremely eccentric but I hustled my beloved into the bathroom with a flourish. It was only then I realized the bathroom didn’t have a door it was more like… a shower stall set into a separate alcove.

But that was fine! We stripped in the chilly air and went to turn on the shower. The first knob created a trickle from a showerhead several feet away. That’s when we started to realize this might not go well. Through experimentation we were able to ascertain a few key facts: regardless of which knob we touched there simply wasn’t enough water pressure to get a solid stream out of any of the showerheads, the open air was in fact quite drafty as there was no door or curtain to protect us, and there was no place nearby to even keep our towels.