When you're moving to a new city, it can be hard to get a mental picture of yourself living there unless you've visited the city at some point. Someone who's spent the last ten years catering Toronto's high end business functions and has never left the Greater Toronto Area would have no idea what to expect from Aurora, Illinois if they were sent there to establish a new branch of the business. To help people like you, here is an assortment of random facts and tidbits that can help fill in the blanks.

Aurora is built upon land that is an average height of 676 feet above sea level. It covers 38.5 square miles, which, given its population of 171,000, gives it a population density about average for an American city.

Aurora's nickname is "The City of Lights." This isn't because the city is a center for SRED (scientific research and experimental development) of light bulbs, but because in 1881, it became one of the first cities in the country to have electric streetlights.

The East and West sides of Aurora have a traditional rivalry which dates all the way back to the 1830s, when two families, the McCartys and the Lakes, opened competing mills on either side of the river. Today this historic rivalry comes out in everything from high school sporting events to which establishment you use to print your business cards online.

The famous Saturday Night Live characters Wayne and Garth (Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey) film their fictitious television show "Wayne's World" for a local Aurora, Illinois public access cable network. The pair was the subject of many sketches featuring famous names like Madonna and Aerosmith.

Clive Cussler, author of a number of action-adventure novels featuring Dirk Pitt's oceanographic work for the fictitious government agency NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency) was born in Aurora.

The crime rate in Aurora was the subject of national interest during the 1990s, when gang violence was responsible for an average of 30 murders per year. The subsequent co-operation of Aurora PD and the FBI during Operation First Degree Burn has swept up many of the gangs' key members and reduced crime to its lowest level in three decades.

If you get tired of working at internet project management, the Philips Park Zoo in Aurora is somewhere you can go at any time of the year for free to visit animals native to the local environment, such as the bald eagle and the wolf.

The per capita income for Aurora, Illinois is just over $27,000, about $800 less than the average for the state.

Of the people living in Aurora, about 52% are white, 32% are Hispanic, and 11% are African American. The most represented ancestries are German, Irish, English, Italian, and Polish.

Over 75% of Aurora's residents have a high school diploma, and over 30% have graduated from university. About ten percent of them leave the city to go to work and come home at night to play with their kids and install contemporary bathroom vanities.