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Area advise IEC

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Old Jul 29th 2019 | 10:16 pm
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Default Area advise IEC

I appreciate there probably are lots of threats regarding my below question, I couldn’t trawl through the pages and pages so here goes:

My girlfriend and I have just been granted our IEC visas which is exciting. I am just after some advise on which would be the best city to plan to live. We will be coming with around $10,000 between us and in an ideal world would like to move to Vancouver area but I have heard the cost of living is very high in comparison to the eastern city’s. This is more of a travel and life experience as opposed to career progression hence the flexibility and open minded opinion on it.

The main factors for us to consider are;
Want to be able to ski (within 2 hours of where we live)
Good job market for temp jobs (bad work, sales etc.)
Not too isolated
Good city/town for youngsters

Thank you for any advise!
 
Old Jul 29th 2019 | 10:30 pm
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Default Re: Area advise IEC

Have you considered Calgary?
 
Old Jul 30th 2019 | 12:14 am
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Default Re: Area advise IEC

Originally Posted by Former Lancastrian
Have you considered Calgary?
I quite like Kelowna, has a nice local vibe and within 30 mins to Big White. Still on the pricey side though, although not as bad as Vancouver
 
Old Jul 30th 2019 | 6:19 am
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Default Re: Area advise IEC

Calgary will technically be the cheapest place to live that ticks all those boxes. The city was high on the oil price hog for a long time and has consequently been in an economic depression since, what, 2015 I think it was - you're definitely not going to accidentally fall into a $100k/yr job with an oil company any more, but anecdotally at least the 'normal' economy doesn't seem much worse off than anywhere else. It's a very physically large, low-density, spread out kind of city with on the whole a very large-C Conservative population which may or may not bother or impact you depending on the sort of person you are and what you're looking to do with yourself. Public transport exists, it's honestly pretty good taking into account the stupid scale of the place but there are necessarily areas that just don't have enough people to justify running more than a handful of buses a day etc. I personally don't like the city and find it ugly and aggressive about a lot of things but YMMV and plenty of people do.

IMO the big upside to Calgary is that with all the oil company HQs etc there's still a quite healthy, busy downtown area rather than having all those businesses run off to suburbia. So, transport's still mostly focused around getting you into the city, therefore can function pretty well, and it's a place where you'll be surrounded by normal people rather than meth-addled lunatics.

Vancouver is still a magnet for travelers despite on the face of it being expensive, reason being that although due to the price of land it's a horrifyingly expensive place to live the bougie dream (big detached house, big garden, 2.4 kids and a dog sort of thing) it's not as bad if you're going to be renting, and it's particularly not as bad if you're going to be renting rooms in a house and dossing around at the ski hill all day as there are a lot of "investment properties" let out for less than you'd expect. The real problem is not cost per se, it's that the rental vacancy rate is so low that you have to at least consider the possibility that you'll be living in a youth hostel, or the converted minivan camper you just bought, for a little while before you find somewhere to settle down. Oh yeah, did I mention the converted minivan campers? There's an awful lot of people living in vans in Van-couver, but it's also ground zero for people starting and ending massive roadtrip holidays, so if that's something you're interested in doing it's probably the best place in North America to find a vehicle for it (search for 'France' or 'Germany' on Craigslist car ads for the full experience)

I wouldn't personally move to the Okanagan (so Vernon, Kelowna, Penticton etc) if you're at risk of working any sort of service industry job - yes, great places to be if after the boat in the morning/ski in the evening type of life, but they're to a great degree sunshine/retirement getaway destinations for Albertans as the summers are generally long and dry and the winters short-ish and dry-ish. End result is you'd have lots of leathery, entitled old shitheads to deal with at work - think Costa Del Sol with worse weather and more lifted pickup trucks - and you'll tend to be paid less than you would elsewhere as so many people move there for the 'lifestyle'. You run into a lot of them here in Golden as they stop over briefly on their way to 'our cabin in the Okanagan...' and the thought of having to put up with them for longer than it takes to get out of the supermarket queue makes my skin crawl. But, again, that's me! Maybe you have a thing for racist grandpas, heh.
 

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