In a word: hell.
Of course, it would be unwise to say bad things about something without the required proof, so to back up my argument I submit the following series of rather biased facts:
A town of 6500 sheep, nearly all
bigoted. The town itself resides 248 km north of
Edmonton,
Alberta. Next to it is the largest lake fully contained within Alberta,
Lesser Slave Lake.
Gossip and rumor are like a
wildfire (which is also nearly an
annual tradidion, costing taxpayers millions each year in the area alone). The town is small enough that you are either in with the entire crowd, or out on your own. Screw up and nobody will shut up about it for years to come.
For teenagers, there is little to do except
party and
drink coffee, and thus you end up seeing endless hoards of coffee drinkers flocking to the truckstop or
Boston Pizza. 14 year old kids going on binges back and forth on between
ecstasy and
alcohol endlessly. One public
high school, 350 students attending (spanning grades 7-12) with a cafeteria that isn't even always open.
No dsl or cable internet, but the town does deserve credit that a (not well known)
Linux distribution was started there, but afterwords moved to Edmonton: MaxOS, recently renamed BearOps (www.bearops.com). The only real geek event is Quake at the Lake, which is an all weekend
LAN party held at the local College annually.
The town has two major industries: oil and lumber. All the mills are foreign, save one, which is owned by the filthy rich Bob Vanderwell who is also well known for his charity work, having built a retirement home, a
Christian church, and an auditorium practically next door to his huge house in the NW (a few blocks down 6th ave, where I used to live).
A pathetic excuse of a town that I would never go back to live in.
Calgary r0x
</rant>
Note: This was written completely from memory. A few things may have either changed or been distorted in the 8 months since I've gotten out of there.
Updated Sept 12, 2002