Friendship Gardens

Marie

I have been at Friendship Gardens for 21 years now. What I like best is everything is located right around me. I could cross the street to a major grocery store. I got a beauty parlor and a nail salon right next to me. There's a pizzeria and a Chinese restaurant. My bank is right on the corner, and so is the doctor's office. And across the street next to a shop, there's a dentist's office I go to. An immediate care place and a new laboratory have just opened up. So almost all the kinds of things that you need to go to or might need to go to are right around you. So that's one pleasant thing about the location. It's in a good central location for a lot of things. The only thing is the size of the apartment. It's something I'm not crazy about. That would be something I would like to improve upon if I could. The kitchen is small, but it's bigger than being in a housing facility where you can't cook at all. But we've got a full-size refrigerator and stove. In the hallway, there's a trash room so that you can throw your trash down the chute and don't have to go outside to get your trash out. We have a laundry room on the first floor. We have two elevators and I'm on the third floor, so it makes it easy to go up and down. We have our own locking mailboxes, so that's nice. I think the people here are pretty good because, over the years, things have changed for the better. We have carpeting now in the hallways, and we didn't have that before. We have air conditioning now in the hallways and we didn't have that before. Those are two major improvements that happened over time. We have a resident coordinator, and they organize trips on Mondays to go out to lunch. You pay a dollar for the bus trip and then you're responsible for the cost of your lunch. Every Monday at 9:30, they go on bus trips and take you shopping. They go to Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart is like one traffic light away.