As a person that has lived in a small nova Scotch town where most people live from pay cheque to pay cheque and minimum wage is a little over eight dollars an hour, you can imaging what it was like for an old codger like me to arrive in a city where only people from other countries will work for fourteen dollars an hour, and twenty dollars an hour can attract some Canadians, but only the desperate ones that have little or no trade. My son and his future wife have lived in fort mac as it is called by the locals for a little over two years, between the two of them they bring home over a hundred thousand a year, now to me that sounds like a lot, but in fort Mac this is just getting by unless you live in a tent on the outskirts of town and eat just enough  to keep you alive and all your earnings go in the bank and you do nothing but work and sleep, then you can leave town with a little money for a rainy day, But for most people in this city who pay an ungodly amount of money for rent, and totally ridiculous prices for a new home that is just stuck together with glue, and to have the biggest and most powerful truck in town is a must, these people will leave with not much more than they came with unless the ones that bought a new house can turn a profit when the time comes and if the market is up. I did manage to work a few jobs while i was there and experienced what it was like to take home a half decent pay cheque, but if i was paying a landlord the rent that is payed out there i would have ended up with the same money i would have had in nova scotia. of all the people i talked to while i was there i did not find one person that wanted to be there, the dream of going home some day with a pocket full of loot was the only thing that kept them going. Before i left for fort mac people were saying, oh don’t go out there it is the crack capital of Canada, drugs are everywhere, well in four months there i never came across a joint let alone crack cocaine, i could have found it if i had wanted to, but i could find it in any city for that matter. It did surprise me though that there is so many homeless people on the street not working, for a city with so much money i found this strange, but then again begging probably was quite profitable.   The city is a very easy place to learn to drive in, i was amazed that i was driving down town after just two days there, they laid it out very well when they dropped this place in the middle of nowhere. This is a young persons town, for a long time i thought i was the oldest person there until one day in canadian tire i saw a little old lady that i am sure was older then me, i should have checked her drivers licence to make sure though. When the time came for me to leave as i think my son and his girlfriend needed some time alone i was rather sad, a totally different feeling that most people have when they depart at the little airport in fort mac i was going to miss it but on the other hand i was lucky to have had the opertunity to have lived there for a short time and experience fort macs way of life. I say to any young person with a trade and the ability to not get caught up in fort macs main steam, go west young man go west