Calgary vs. California

For last week and a half of July, I was vacationing in California and for the most part, it’s a much more enjoyable place to live in comparison to my hometown of Calgary. After being spoiled by the lifestyle that Californians live and the abundance of things to do within areas nearby Chino Hills, it’s a place I’d like to move to someday.

There were positive and negative experiences I had during my vacation though so here are a few things you can expect on the off-chance you’re a Calgarian looking to vacation somewhere in California.

Here are the positives:

• Nice weather all year round: The constantly warm weather is something to savour during your stay. Seldomly do we have strings of days with such nice weather in Calgary without random rain, hail or snow popping out of nowhere.
  
  A beautiful sunset at the bay of Newport Beach
• With warm weather comes great benefits:
  • Better roads
  • Lower chance of rusting on cars.
  • Higher speed limits since roads will rarely be slippery due to snow/ice
  • No potholes/road construction is very rare
  • Not worrying about what you should wear today
  • Not having to shovel the walk because there are no snowfalls
• Refreshing landscape: While in California, I attended my cousin’s wedding reception on a yacht at Newport Beach. It was a very refreshing experience as I’ve been used to seeing plains, mountains and city landscape within Calgary and rural Alberta.
  
  A panorama of the bay at Newport Beach

  
  Alberta Plains

  
  (View from Banff, Alberta) Rocky Mountains (ok, I’ll admit the mountains are nice)

• Abundance of arcades: If you’re from Calgary and enjoy spending time at arcades, you probably shared in the sorrow of the closing of the Eau Claire arcade (the last dedicated arcade in the city). There are plenty to be found in California and you can find some pretty awesome deals like the one at Speedzone:
  
  $20 for unlimited go-kart racing at one track and unlimited gaming at the arcade for 4 hours
• Awesome places to shop: There are many good shops and malls to be found in California. A lot of them are also quite massive (one outlet mall I went to claimed to have 150 stores!). Take this panorama of the food court I shot at Ontario Mills Mall for example…it’s one of the biggest food courts I’ve seen!
  
  You should’ve seen the 150 store outlet mall
• Plenty of attactions: In Calgary, we get the Stampede once a year. In Southern California, you can choose from popular attractions like Disneyland and Universal Studios all year round:
  
  Universal Studios Red Carpet

  
  Some of the neat effects displayed on the Universal Studios tour

And now for some of the negative things…

• Smog: I never realized how clean Calgary’s air was until I made an observation one afternoon while trying to look for a skyline from my cousin’s backyard. The air is smoggy and distant landscape unfortunately fades away in the smog.
• Earthquakes: I stayed with my relatives in Chino Hills and on July 29th a 5.4 magnitude earthquake occurred with Chino Hills being the epicentre. I was at Universal Studios at the time and did not feel anything, but according to everyone at the house, it was shaky and a little bit terrifying. Apparently it was a long time coming so seldom earthquakes aren’t enough to turn me off from moving there
• Free luggage carts: When departing, the use of luggage carts at the Calgary airport were free to use. If you land in LAX, you’ll have to fork out $3.00 to use one:
  
• The Airport: Despite mentioning the pay-for luggage carts in the previous point, the airport (LAX) deserved a section for itself. First and foremost, that airport is poorly designed. For example, when we were going through the departure process, we had to get our luggage x-rayed — this was not a problem. However, when it came time to put our luggage through the x-ray machine, it was located right in front of an entrance. I did not take a picture of how badly this was laid out, but you will see the frustrations experienced by both travellers and staff with my illustration below:
  
  The party coming from the entrance was much larger than illustrated, and yes, our paths did cross.
  People also walked up to the staff member trying to immediately get their luggage x-rayed without realizing there was a lineup.

  Once we got our luggage x-rayed, we then had to travel to our gate. But first, were the lineups to the screening process. I think this would be best depicted in a comic strip:

  
  Believe it or not this is not exaggerated. Click above to view full size.

Although I could say some things about the screening process, it wasn’t very much different than what you’d experience at the Calgary airport so I can’t nitpick much about it.

What interesting travel experiences have you had?