i live in the fifth best city and have been to the former best vancouver many times...there are many other places i would rather live....
Leo2: The outback deserts are just wonderful...in winter. I fly off every winter into the deserts for reflectionand renewal. Get your self to Arkaroola resort, or Alice Springs, or Yulara, or Toboorburra, or a multitude of other places, they are starkly beautiful like Americas desert places. You can camp under the stars in places where you know there is not a soul for a hundred miles. The downside is that we kill European tourists every year who venture into the deserts without the proper mindset. One lady died when she decided she would "walk for help" after bogging their vehicle in sand. She was over sixty miles from the nearest settlement but refused to believe that there wasn't a town over the next hill as in Europe. She walked about Twelve miles before the heat got her. Her partner stayed with the vehicle and survived.
LOL, never been there, but I am told both the Sahara and Antarctica offer wonderful opportunities for isolated reflection - not sure I would want to live in either place though. Australia is a fan-bloody-tastic society, (something not enough people on here realise,) but you are risking sounding somewhat American in not accepting that it has its down side. I love it here, and I think I am going to do my tertiary education in New South Wales if I can get a place at a good university.
Perhaps but the US has some of the world's greatest college party towns. http://www.pubclub.com/collegefootball/index.htm
Dom, Great stats that surely will cause a few conservative heads to explode. Just goes to show you that you are safer with a murdering gangster than with a praise Jesus, wack-job, southern baptist, type "holy man". However I ask that you bear in miond that the Founding Fathers of the USA were NOT overly religious people. In fact they recognized and built into the Constitution the danger of religion mixed with government. Only recently, since Ronald Reagan era, have the conservatives been spreading this outright lie about how the US was founded on christian principles. That is an outright and outrageous factual inaccuracy.
Maybe having a 4 to 5 times more chance of having your head blown off, then having to pay an arm and a leg to get it sewn back on has something to do with the US rankings
and "religious zealots" does not necessarily mean "Over" religious, more like "fundamentalist" or "fanatical" and The Christian faith has a separation between church and government.
Perhaps you need to comment on things you know more about? Reading this pile of garbage above tells me you know little of the out-back, it aint all desert mate, get out more.