The first weekend I came to the United States, I was invited by my colleague Max to visit his home. I could get a close look at the living conditions of the American people. Max is the supervisor of one of our teams, so I guess his income is okay. I don’t know if he lives in a town or a countryside, but what I can be sure of is that he lives in a residential area~ (nonsense) From the hotel where I live to his home, it’s only more than 10 minutes by car. In the United States, you have to use driving time to calculate wherever you go, because they are far apart and walking is unrealistic.
The traffic signal is hanging out there, not sure what will it be with heavy wind...
P.S.: about the income of the American people, a colleague told me later that the income of ordinary people is about 50,000 US dollars, and engineers working at Ford may have an income of 100,000 US dollars a year, but you have to consider mortgage and car loan. This is only for reference, not sure if everyone could agree or not.
Without much ado, let’s see the picture: This house is opposite my colleague’s house. They are all low-rise buildings, no high-rise buildings, and the road is very wide. It’s well maintained outside.
Every household in this area has a lawn in front of the door. In fact, it’s not just in front. There is also a lawn (garden) behind the house. Max said that these houses were built about 70 years ago. He bought it here like 20 years ago. But he renovated his house. I will talk about the layout of his house later. However, after 70 years, it feels like it’s still in a very good condition, even from the outside. The quality is very good.
From the picture, you can see that the exterior of the house is brick structure, but in the hotel room where I live, it is kind of brick plus wood. The walls I can touch are all wood, including the stairs from the first floor to the second floor. I don’t know why. The picture below is the hotel where I live: You can see that part of the house is brick and a lot of wood boards are used. Later, a colleague told me that it’s not wood, or not completely wood. The structure of the house can be made of wood as a frame, and then a kind of board called Drywall is used…
This is very different from us in China. We use reinforced concrete and bricks, wood or drywall is not commonly used.
From the picture, you can see that the exterior of the house is brick structure, but in the hotel room where I live, it is wooden.
The walls I can touch are all wood, including the stairs from the first floor to the second floor. I don’t know why. The picture below is the hotel where I live: You can see that part of the house is brick and a lot of wood boards are used. Later, a colleague told me that it’s not wood, or not completely wood. The structure of the house can be made of wood as a frame, and then a kind of board called Drywall is used…
The picture below is my colleague’s house with a warehouse: There are flowers and trees in front of the door. You can see tulips;
The sky is very clean. It's much better than what we have current now. Hope we'll be here in near future.
His house has two floors above ground and one floor below ground. The bottom floor is a basement. They call it basement here. This floor looks very big. There are fitness equipment, treadmills and so on; there is a home theater (projector, sofa, sound system), and there are washing machines and dryers, heating facilities, and some storage devices.
The ground floor has a kitchen at the entrance, then a dining room, then a living room, a bathroom, an office room, and a bedroom; he said this bedroom has heating and is only used in winter; The second floor has another bedroom and a large bathroom. The top of the bedroom is the roof we can see from the picture above, it will not be used during winter, to save heating energy. There is a skylight right above the bed where you can see the sky. Isn’t it cozy~
He had to do some pruning work today, yard work, which is pruning flowers and grasses. I also helped him. It was weeding and trimming some flowers and grasses along the wall of the house. Some leaves had grown outside and had to be cut nicely. Otherwise it would look messy; Max also cleaned up his car. He dragged out a vacuum cleaner from his warehouse (which has a lot of things, bikes, chairs, tools, etc.) and removed all the dirt from inside his car. He said his mother was coming soon and he couldn’t make it look like he was living badly. You see, this is true all over the world. Don’t let your mother worry.
I said that many Americans have large body shapes. He said that many people don’t do their own gardening work. Some of them outsource it to others. But I like working very much. It can exercise my body and save money. Why not?
After trimming, he said he had to collect these cut grasses because they could be recycled. This is not normal for us, even though we are doing the same thing in recent years, but it will need several years for this habit. He had several large trash cans, some of which were used to collect recyclable garbage such as mineral water bottles and one was specially used to collect grasses. He said someone would come to collect these things every Wednesday. I don’t remember what they were used for. Maybe they were used to make feed? At first I thought they were used to make paper~
Now it’s time to prepare lunch. I saw a Brita water filter in his kitchen. I also use this at home. It was recommended by Wen Kai before, who studied in Michigan University before and worked for Ford several years. He said it was good. I filter it with this every time I boil water. Before coming to America, I heard from my colleagues that Americans don’t like drinking boiled water. Later colleagues here said it depends on people. Some are like this and drink tap water directly but I think it tastes bad so I bought bottled water at Walmart later on they sell one kit 40 bottles for less than 6 dollars but buying one bottle in the 24-hour supermarket at work costs more than 1 dollar which is ridiculous. I bought one in the supermarket once and never bought it again.
He also prepared some food for me which should have been specially bought he said one of them was Japanese food which also had pork in it. The way to eat at noon was to heat up what was bought from the supermarket which should be soup, then put noodles in it and cook it for a while. The taste was good~
I don’t know if they eat very simply at home unlike us Chinese who have to prepare a lot of ingredients. The picture below is very vivid but this only considers manufacturing process without considering food material composition. When I was in college, I studied materials science. My teachers said that studying material science is like cooking: adding different materials using different heat different oil amounts, sometimes adding the lid, sometimes not , different water amounts, different seasonings will result in different results.
I'm very curious about the eating in normal US family, what I know for American food is burgers, Sandwich, Fried Potato. That's it...
Max also made some desserts. They were a bit sweet, but is good. Celine will like it I think. There seemed to be something similar in China. There were walnuts inside. The breakfast at the hotel where I live also had desserts. There were also desserts in the 24-hour supermarket at work (I tried one once, it was insanely sweet, I couldn’t eat it). It seemed that Americans liked to eat them. I ate one piece. I couldn’t eat too much for lunch.
After eating, he didn’t use the dishwasher. It seemed that his house didn’t have a dishwasher. He washed it by hand. The hotel where I live had a dishwasher, but I never used it. I also washed it by myself. Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to use it or to I want to save electricity~
It is a pleasant time to be here with Max. Thank you!
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