Moving and costs of living

It had been quite a while since I last blogged, and it is to my pleasure to see a fellow Indonesian blogger leaving some comments on my blog... A young man from Central Java he is, with an interest in the Hallyu (Korean wave).

Welcome akhlis, and thank you for leaving your trails, I appreciate it (unlike some of you regular readers who still remain anonymous...I encourage you people to leave your footprints here too).

Now I have some updates to do.

First of all, I have moved out of my home stay location in the southern part of Florence, KY, due to some personal reasons that I cannot possibly disclose here. Suffice it to say that the family had been helpful in facilitating my move, and I am especially grateful for having Kerry as my adoptive mom, I'm forever indebted to her.

I moved out to an apartment building the northern part of the city. It is a 380 square-foot efficiency apartment, with a monthly rent of $510 (already includes water and gas) and electricity bills that is paid separately for an average of $20 a month.

It already included a medium-sized refrigerator, a stove and oven in the kitchen and a bathroom with a bath tub and a shower when I moved in, hence the only furniture I had to purchase on my own was a metal arm futon, which cost me $120.

And oh, a microwave too for $50. A microwave may not seem essential for you my fellow Asians, but believe me that when most of your food are available in instant packagings, you would want to consider getting a microwave.

Altogether my purchases for detergent, soap bars, shampoo, blankets, chair pads etc cost me a total of $260 (excluding the microwave and fridge I just mentioned). What a cost of living.

My apartment security deposit for the first month and its application fee, together with the rental fee for the month of November cost me another hefty sum of around $430, just to give an idea of what it takes to start renting an apartment in a mid-sized city of 25,000 people in America.

Costs of living aside now, I am very delighted to have my new apartment located nearby strategic establishments such as McD, PapaJohn's Pizza, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell...all of them located merely 150 metres away from my apartment building. Which means just next to your door step.

But the down side of living there is the distance it has from my workplace of Spartan...which is 6.5 kilometres away, meaning 90 minutes of walking or 35 minutes of biking everyday. It has been wearing me down for the last two days that transferring to the store of Spartan in Erlanger branch, which is located just 2 kilometres away from my apartment, have become something of an urgency. Otherwise I would have to bike for 35 minutes under the snow during winter, something I could not possibly stand doing everyday.