Skyline Pics of Halifax

[Hali87]

A few anecdotal impressions from the ROC:

[Friend from Kingston who visited]: "I thought it would be more... historic. I'm kind of disappointed there's skyscrapers and stuff here"

[Friend from London, ON who visited]: "It's way bigger than London"

[Friend from Vancouver who has been to NB but not NS]: "So do you guys have like, highrises...?"

[Various people from Victoria on different occasions]: "Halifax reminds me a LOT of home. Of course, Victoria's a bit bigger, but still"

[My cousin's girlfriend, who's from Japan but lives in Calgary: "Halifax? Oh! That's near PEI!"

[Random stranger from the 905-belt]: "Halifax? What do people DO there? It must be so boring to live there!"

My neighbour in the BC interior was only vaguley aware that there was a place in Canada called Halifax, and had no mental image whatsoever of what it would be like.

A friend of mine who recently visited from Montreal sort of conceptualized it as "a city in the same sense that Montreal is a city", the difference in size figuring as an afterthought compared to the differences in culture and surroundings. This is mostly how I view this kind of thing as well.

I think at a national scale the general impression of Halifax from people who haven't been here (in my experience) is that it's a "fun" or "nice" city, one of the large-ish ones in Canada but not as big as TO/MTL/VAN, that everyone drinks a lot and eats mostly seafood and donairs, and that the ocean is adjacent to it, and other than that it's a bit of a mystery. The one "false" impression that for some reason seems to be very common (even here) is that it's more socially conservative and WASP-y than the Canadian average. I guess this probably plays into the "why are there people outside at 1AM???" mentality a bit.