The Lay of the Land

I read over our entire blog yesterday and realized that we haven't given a lot of practical information about Bethel. This blog entry, and perhaps a few to follow will try to give you a sense of what this town looks like and what living here is like for us. The first thing to keep in my mind is that we don't have a car. A lot of people in Bethel do have cars, however there are enough people that don't to necessitate not one, but several cab companies. We try not to use the cabs very much, at $5 a person for a ride in town, and $7 to go outside of town it can become pretty expensive. This means we do a lot of walking. We walk to work, to the store, to friends houses, to the teen center, to the high school for basketball games and anywhere else we want to go.

Luckily, we live pretty close to the center of town. There is nothing here in Bethel that looks like a traditional downtown, even for a small town. There is a highway (two lane undivided) that branches off into Ridgecrest Ave. and runs down by the river. Along these two roads, spread out over a couple of miles, there are businesses and municipal buildings.

There are two main grocery stores in town, AC and Swansons. Swansons has been here the longest, and has a deli and a clothing store on the second floor. They also have a hardware and furniture store. They are closer to the river and a lot patrons have their groceries boxed up to take home on their snow machine to their village. AC is closer to us, and looks more like a grocery store downstate. It is large and has a fast food restaurant inside it. I have been pleasantly surprised by the variety of food we can purchase here. They may not have everything we are used to, but they do have an amazing variety for being in such a remote area.

However, you will pay a lot for the food they sell. Our entire budget for a weeks worth of groceries back home was $60 a week, so to drop a few hundred on food every week is a little disturbing. I don't know why a Kiwi fruit can travel from New Zealand to Seattle and still be affordable, but if you want to bring it to the Alaska bush you are going to have to pay a lot more. Milk is around $10 a gallon, Doritos are $8.50, juice is $9, a loaf of bread is $6. It helps that we eat a lot of rice and beans, which we buy in bulk- but there is only so much you can do to keep costs down. The cost of bypass mail (which is how a lot of our groceries come in) is going to raise quite a bit come May, so stay tuned for more rising costs.

There are several restaurants in Bethel, most of them do their bulk of business in delivery. . A few have a regular seating area and actually do feel like a restaurant, like Sho-gun and VIP (which has Korean food and sushi). People don't seem to do a lot of socializing out at restaurants, which surprised me when we moved here. Brother's Pizza is worth the trip since on a clear day you can view the mountains from their place out at the airport. The wierd thing is that most of these places have very similar menus, burgers, sandwiches, Chinese, and pizza.

The town is rather small, I think about six miles from end to end. It is shaped like a horse shoe, we live in the bend. There are several neighborhoods, which they call subdivisions. Tundra Ridge, City Sub, Blueberry. In any other place these wouldn't have individual names, the place just isn't big enough. I wonder if it is because so many people come from such tiny villages, therefore any place that is separated from another gets it's own designation. That is all the practical information I will give for now, next time I will cover entertainment in Bethel, which will be a very easy and short blog to write. -Megan