Surely personal impressions are one of the most valuable things you can get from a forum? It is easy to read the newspapers online, get official crime/drugs stats, look at house prices etc from other sources. It is far less easy to get a feeling for how social issues will actrually impact your daily life.

I live in Vancouver. There are drugs problems, gang problems, policing issues, car crime, homelessness problems and a largely unspoken undercurrent of racial tension in some quarters. I have not personally experienced any of these. I have not had a bad experience in Vancouver. I would heartily recommend the city as a place to live. Nor did I have a bad experience in the UK from the chav army, beer-swilling football hooligans, gangs of out of control illiterate 5 year olds or any of the myriad complaints about the UK I so often see mentionred on these boards. I do not deny that these may be part of other people's experiences but it was not part of mine. That said, I would also recommend doing as much background research as you can from the sources mentioned by other posters as well.

I visited Kelowna on a recce. It struck me as a great place for the outdoor enthusiast but a difficult place for a professional to find work. I talked to a few (Canadian) locals who worked in relatively poorly paid jobs. They loved living there but had bought in the area when housing cost much less than it does now. They acknowledged the difficulty in finding work, unless you are in the skilled trades and were somewhat apprehensive about future prospects for the younger members of the family in the area.

Yes, I agree, personal impressions, info from forums and reccies are important. The links I posted were to answer some of the specific questions which the poster asked - population etc.

I think with this thread there's the risk that there's a fair degree of consensus somewhere in there in the fog. (!)

Agree too on the jobs for professionals. As I mentioned, there are lots of small businesses, plenty in construction, landscaping, retail, services etc, but not many larger companies which can offer jobs to HR professionals, marketers etc.

I believe it's there for all to see, I think we cut to the reality of life here for the OP and other interested parties. Delivering a message of "reality" is all I care about. Thankfully our heads seem to be in a similar place, you're obviously informed and I truly commend that.

Nothing wrong with fog - it usually clears. Part of the natural immigration process.

R.

Thank you. Hopefully the original poster will get what they wanted out of the thread.

Have to say that after living in Kelowna for three and a half years (canada for five), I never got the "it's a bad place" vibe. I was downtown last night going to an event and I am 8 months pregnant and felt perfectly safe.

Of course I am aware there is a drug problem (as there is everywhere these days) but after living in Brighton and parts of London, it doesn't feel anywhere as "in your face". I can recall living in my friend's spare room when I first left Uni and had just started my first London job. I had to get off the Seven Sisters tube station to walk to her place near the Broadwater Farm Estate - now that's scarey! Speaking for my husband, who is a pharmacist, Kelowna has nowhere near the drug problem that Brighton has (where we used to live).

BTW, the way the Kelowna Food Bank has written its stats is a little ambigous, but if you read a press release, you learn that they help 2,500 people a month and it is mostly these same people (only 57 new households a month) that makes up to 30,000 people served a year. It doesn't mean that 25% of the city's population are living on handouts from the Foodbank. I looked it up cos I thought the stats seemed a lot out of whack and was interested.

That said, I know that Kelowna has a rich/poor divide but unfortunately that is true in most Western cities these days. I guess what I am saying is that "yes" Kelowna has its issues but in my experience they are not as bad as many other places I have lived. I grew up in rural Devon and that was a hot bed of crime and drug abuse (I guess there wasn't much else to do) - it was also quite poor as jobs are mainly minimum wage and seasonal. I grew up on a council estate and the stuff that went on there was seriously bad.

At the end of the day, we all experience things differently. I quite enjoyed the "Golden Compass" on Friday night, but my husband thinks it was too dumbed down and hasn't stopped moaning about it!

well said~~~..you have posted pretty well much exactly what i wanted to say ...i agree with very much so!......

You may very well be right about Kelowna, it's not somewhere that one hears of outside this site, but dear-oh-dear, why have you abandoned the English langauge "I have self-actualized to a totally higher level of being" belongs in pseuds corner.

I was somewhat high and it suited the mindstate of the moment. My apologies for the prog-rock-esque waffle.

Anyways I switched my apathy mode back on now.

R.

Or possibly the psychiatric ward.

Apathy mode is switched on. Not playing, not biting.

R.

Well good on balance. Do you bite when you switch off your Apathy Mode?

Yes, I do more than bite. I am a truly evil mofo.

R.

Yes, I've rather formed that impression myself. Why do you think it's clever to use expressions like "mofo"? Are you ethnic?

Well I guess I have deveoped a vocabulary wider than that of basic Victorian English.

And what if I'm ethnic you damned whitebread honkey.

R.

Maybe he's with the capo di capi.