I have no pictures - I really wish I did - but I thought I would do a quick post to give impressions of Guam.

We tried out a "new" grocery store last night. The name of it was American Grocery. The name really should be International Grocery. I think there was more Asian foods than there was American. I would love to have pictures of the aisles to post. It was really interesting. The one great buy that we made was $2.99 for a half gallon of ice cream. We could not believe that we found it so cheap - and it was real ice cream. We had paid $8.00 for a half gallon of Dreyers vanilla ice cream to have for FHE on Monday night. The other horrible price we have to pay is $5.99 for a gallon of milk. It is not even good milk. They reconstitute milk solids and bottle it up. It has a strange flavor (or it could just be my mind playing tricks on me) and so I only use it on cereal or mix up chocolate milk. The grocery prices are really high here. Our friends, the Westergards said they spend $600 a month on food for just the two of them. I saw a TV ad for Taco Bell last night advertising a $5.00 meal. A message came across the screen saying that the price in Guam was $7.49. Our motto is "Get used to it".

The other thing I wish I had pictures for is the morning we spent with a real estate agent today. We looked at an apartment just after we got here and the real estate agent was supposed to get back to us but didn't. I had been on line looking at some possibilities and decided to contact another agent. He had 4 complexes he took us to. The first was back at the place we looked at before but we saw an apartment in another section today. It wasn't much better than the first. There were broken drawers in the kitchen and the stove looked old and dirty. Then we went to another complex nearby. These were two story townhouses. The area was nice, landscaped (something most apartment complexes don't have here) and in a quiet area. There were three units, all the same floor plan, but some were a bit neglected. They had three bedrooms which we really do not need and they cost $300 a month more than where we are now. We next went to a small complex that had maybe 20 units. It too was 3 bedroom but it was in much better condition and the price was only $950. I liked it. Wayne did not. The real estate agent was nice enough to tell us that the neighborhood was not the best and there has been a problem with people hanging out in the parking lot late at night drinking beer and being very noisy. I think he noticed our name tags and realized that wasn't our thing. There are so many military people here with housing allowances that the cost of rentals has been constantly going up. The areas that we can afford have all had to start renting to GHUR which is equivalent to our Section 8. It is really hard to find good, affordable housing. Wayne does not really like the idea of having to move an apartment full of stuff and so I guess we have decided that we can tough it out where we are for 17 months. Our apartment really is better than anything we have looked at. It is just going to make our little house in Clovis look like a mansion when we return.