I've been in Calgary for just a few days (3? 4? whatever), and there's a lot here I'd like to comment on.
Calgary almost feels like an American city. It's big, fast moving, and people can actually drive. However, what surprised me is how nice people are. Everybody I've talked to (in restaurants, on the bus, etc) has been really nice. Winnipeg is the same way, but I don't expect that kind of thing in a bigger city.
Calgary has a series of walkways downtown called the +15 system (because it's roughly 15 feet off the ground). According to Wikipedia, it's the largest of its kind and covers something like 26km. The guy who invented (or planned or whatever) it won an award.
Basically, using the +15's I can go to the third floor of my work and, without leaving a building, go anywhere downtown. The buildings typically have stores, restaurants (entire food courts), attactions, and all kinds of other stuff in their +15s. I've only been to 4 buildings, and I counted at least 20 restaurants, some stores, dentists, eye doctor, and an airplane hanging from the ceiling. It's a really cool system.
Driving here is interesting. Downtown they have reversable streets, which is something I've never seen before. The streets are either 5 or 7 lanes (5, I think), and at rush hour they vary how many lanes are in each direction. In the morning, it'll be 4 into downtown and 1 out, and opposite in the evening. Really cool, but I'm surprised it doesn't cause a lot of accidents (they're clearly marked, but people are idiots).
If you look at a map (
http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=calgary) and zoom in a little, you'll see that the main streets are all formed into a grid. Within each piece of the grid, streets have similar names. I think it's a mixed blessing at best, because on one hand you can easily find somebody's house ("appleton? That must be off apple drive!") but on the other hand, it gets really, really tricky because a lot of areas have over 5 (often over 10) different variations of each friggin' name ("Apple grove? Apple way? Apple Lane? Street? Boulevard? Place? Park? Crescent? Drive? etc.etc.etc.)
Also, there's terrain here. Not much, but some. There's hills, valleys, rivers, little lakes, etc. Where I come from (Winnipeg), it's totally flat, and we have 2 rivers and a whole bunch of creeks. And that's it.
So yeah, that's my first few thoughts on living in Calgary. I'll post more as I think of it.
