[aaronlevin]

It's a combination of:

- getting dark around 4/5pm - extremely dry and cold - winter starts in October, lasts until late April - massive urban sprawl so the city core is dead during the winter, and therefore the city feels lifeless.

That's particularly bleak and definitely biased, but it's not far from the truth.

[krrrh]

I lived and worked downtown in the late 90s/early 00s, and going back recently, I have to say that it is a lot better than it used to be. There is an incredible amount of investment in the core, and the whole ice district area on 104th ave is pretty remarkable, including the new museum, hockey arena, and Stantec tower—which will be 68-stories high, quite surprisingly, the tallest tower in Canada outside of Toronto. The city has also invested in light rail expansion, and just installed a new bike grid in the downtown core. Things feel very different than they used to.

[refurb]

The short days are definitely tough. The shortest day of the year has less than 8 hours of sunshine. Sun comes up at 9am and sets by 4pm. However, Edmonton is usually quite sunny in the winter.

Conversely the summers are great. It's light from 5am to 10pm, so get almost 17 hours of sunlight. If you include twilight, it's more like 18 hours.

[cknoxrun]

It's not that different from much of Europe. Edmonton is at the same latitude as Dublin.

[noir_lord]

I'm in Hull in the UK and we have basically identical latitude, Hull is just fractionally north.

Winter nights are long but I love them, I sleep far better in the cold and dark than hot and light, insomnia and the sun appearing at 4:30am sucks.

[fnbr]

Yeah, I agree. I lived in London, UK for a while and found the lack of sunlight much worse. Edmonton has a lot of sun, which makes it pretty tolerable.