We love using our french press coffee maker in Okinawa, but our land lord was specific in asking that we not try to put waste down the sink. Back in the U.S. most of new apartments have a disposal; but in Okinawa there is something else in the sink, it's almost like a Russian doll:
You take the first lid off and find a little basket:
So, you've got this basket, "probably there to catch food going down the drain, that's cool."
But, what's that underneath the sink basket?
You can take that thing out too and what you are left with looks like a toilet plunger turned inside-out and a couple of inches of water. Don't take the water out! That's there to keep the pressure and to ensure that no unseemly smells start rising up from the bowels of the drains.
But you do want to clean this area out weekly because food will get in there and it will slowly decay and a little biosphere will become a big biosphere pretty quickly. Life is teeming on a sub-tropical island.
While we were exploring the grocery stores we noticed in the cleaning supplies section this little guy:
inside are these little fellas:
These are "sink socks" for lack of any ability to read Japanese. We assume that you use them to reduce the amount of food that gets stuck in the sink basket.
Ground coffee not only gets stuck in the sink basket but also passes through it and will clog your sink drain. Not knowing how to A) look-up a plumber in Japanese, B) assuming we could do that, we don't know how to say, "Hey, we have a clogged drain;" we opted for preventative measures, namely, putting this little sock on our sink basket:
30 of these come in a pack, so you get about a month of coffee protection!
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