Return to Table of Contents, "Two Years in Salem (Studying Abroad from the Age of 60)"

Housing, meals, prices

Let me talk about prices. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a two-storied apartment house. It corresponded to 2LDK (2 bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen) in Japan, but its size was larger than 3LDK in Japan. I can't tell the exact size because the lease contract didn't show the size. Rent came to $420 a month, including a large-sized refrigerator, a dishwasher, an electric oven with four burners, the charge for using water, and a parking space. It was located in the next lot across the street from Chemeketa Community College. There were about 20 apartment buildings, all with two-bedroom apartments. Each individual apartment had its own address, different from Japan where an apartment's address is the apartment's number, the apartment building's name, and the building's address. I didn't need to include the name "Green Wood Park Apartment" in my address. I had not yet seen any nameplates on US homes, not to mention apartments, like the ones on gates or doors in Japan. Only the house number was shown using large numbers on the front wall or door of each home. Though you don't know who lives in a house without a nameplate, when you try to look for someone's house, if you have their address, you will find it more easily than in Japan because every street has a name posted on the street corners, and all addresses include a street name.

I found my apartment entirely with the help of my school. Chemeketa Community College had a department called the Student Life Office which took care of students from abroad. Japanese staff were working part time there (working students). To my surprise, when making arrangements in Japan to study in the US, a Japanese called me from the college in Salem. I didn't expect such a call at all, but he was very helpful. He made reservations for me for a shuttle bus from Portland to a Salem motel. He took me out to look for an apartment on the day I checked into the motel. After staying three nights, I finally moved into my apartment. He also helped me to contract with the power company for electricity, the telephone office for phone service, and a cable TV company for watching TV. These all would have been difficult from me to arrange with my poor English. Though I lived in an apartment alone, most students shared two-bedroom apartments (the Student Life Office helps students find roommates).

If you wanted to live with a Salem family, the college would interview you, and introduce you to a family registered with the college. That would cost $300 per month with two meals a day included.

I subscribed to cable TV because I wanted to watch many tennis programs, but I was surprised that there were about 50 channels included in a normal contract. There was a classic movie channel, a music channel, a sports channel, and even a Chemeketa Community College channel. During the season's four grand slam tennis tournaments (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open), tennis was broadcast for five or six hours a day. I recorded all those programs, but later it took a lot of time for me to finish watching them all. The more money you pay, the more channels you can get, even including NHK's Japanese program channel.

By the way, speaking of newspapers, The Oregonian and The Statesman-Journal were sold at school, the supermarket, and so forth. A copy of The Oregonian cost 35 cents, one-third of the price of a newspaper in Japan. We were often given The Oregonian free in my Reading class. The Statesman-Journal cost 50 cents, but its Sunday edition cost $1.50, and was more than 10 cm thick with feature articles and a lot of advertising, etc. The Statesman-Journal offered a limited subscription option which cost $16 per eight weeks for Saturday, Sunday, and holiday editions. I subscribed to that during my last year in Salem.

As for meals, at breakfast I usually ate a bowl of cereal with milk, and an egg fried sunny-side up, which was the only dish I could cook. There were so many kinds of cereal in supermarkets, and I heard that many families in the US ate cereal for breakfast. I had never been able to cook anything, but I learned to cook only eggs fried sunny-side up during intensive training by my wife just before studying abroad. She said then that eggs would last only one week even if they were kept in the refrigerator. At first, I bought a pack of six eggs since I ate one egg a day, but several weeks later I became aware that the term of validity was about 20 days, so I started to buy packs of 12 eggs from then on. Milk was good for 10 days. Foods, including vegetables, in the US seemed to last longer than in Japan.

At lunch I ate at the school's cafeterias, or I ate a banana or instant ramen (precooked Chinese noodles) and yogurt in my apartment. At dinner, I usually thawed a TV dinner, drank canned beer and Japanese sake, and ate a few bars of cheese or canned food if I was still hungry. The canned beer that I was drinking every evening was cheap at ordinary supermarkets, but a discount store to which I was introduced sold a 355 ml can of beer for 50 cents, which was less than one-third the price in Japan. Japanese sake that was sold at a nearby supermarket was more expensive than in Japan.

Because I was not able to cook, I was likely to lead a monotonous dietary life, but it was a Korean living in the next apartment house to mine who made it colorful. She was in her mid-thirties, had two children, and was married to an American missionary. She had lived in Japan for five years when she was single, so she spoke Japanese fluently, and she liked Japan better than America. I soon became friends with her. She was interested in cooking and was good at it; Korean, Japanese, and many other kinds. She often invited me to meals or brought dishes to my apartment. She made my dietary life really varied.

I often drank a 60 cents hot coffee at the school's cafeteria, and we students were also allowed to bring coffee into classrooms. Canned coffee was not produced in the US as in Japan, and I wondered why not. You could have a meal for $5 to $6 at restaurants, the quantity of which was double that in Japan, and if you left it unfinished, you could take the rest home. I was never able to eat a whole meal, even a hamburger set because of all the French fries with it. There were several Japanese restaurants in Salem, but they had a reputation for being expensive. Though there were two Japanese restaurants named "Kyoto," one of them closed down during my stay in Salem. It seemed to be too difficult to gather customers when the price of a meal was beyond $10. There was also a small restaurant named "Ramen Ichiban" that a Japanese couple was running.

I once bought five instant cup ramens for $1 at a supermarket's bargain sale. If you checked bargain sales in advance, you could buy various things at surprisingly cheap prices. When I was driving with my friends on a country road, corn sold for $1 a dozen by the roadside. It was fresh and tasty when I ate some that my friend gave me, so I could hardly believe how cheap it was, the price of which would be over ten times higher in Japan.

A rise of gas prices was in the news at the time, but gas was only half the price of that in Japan. Electricity charges were far and away cheaper than in Japan. I experienced something wasteful as to electricity use. My first winter in Salem was so cold that one of the faucets in the kitchen froze, and water didn't come out. When I notified the manager of the apartment buildings, he demanded that I should heat all my rooms 24 hours a day to protect the water pipes from freezing. There were temperature controls in two bedrooms and the living room, and the kitchen was open to the living room. Until then I was heating only the room I was using when I was at home, turning off other rooms' thermostats, and I of course didn't heat any rooms when I went out to school, my friends' homes, shopping, or elsewhere, but since then I came to turn on all the thermostats. A few days later, I returned to Japan temporarily for a week to spend New Years with my family. Then, I was overcome by a queer deep emotion that my apartment far away from Japan was being heated in spite of me being gone. Though I kept heating all the rooms around the clock until the end of February, even at that time the electricity charge was only about $60 a month.

I went to see a movie only once. A ticket for a road show was $3.50 in the daytime, but it was a little higher in the evening. Why a ticket was so cheap might be that a great number of people went to the movie theaters. I wondered why they bothered to go to the movies in spite of the fact that movies and dramas were broadcast on TV every day, and there were movie TV channels. I think Americans are a race of people who like to go out. It is obvious from pro sports; many kinds of sports are economically feasible as pro sports, and there are many teams in each sport. At any rate, as with the movies, famous stars get paid so much, and production costs take a huge sum of money. I wonder how a movie theater can keep tickets so cheap.

A barber shop I used to go to requested $5, but I paid $6 adding $1 as a tip. They neither washed my hair nor did they give me a shave, only giving me a trimming. It took just ten minutes, but I needed an appointment. Compared with 3,800 yen in Japan, I prefer the American way that is economical, efficient, and fast.

The postage for letters was 33 cents for sending in the US or 60 cents to Japan, as opposed to 60 cents for sending a letter in Japan, or 110 yen for sending a letter to the US from Japan. I felt on the whole like living expenses were half of that in Japan.