I've travelled extensively throughout Canada (this last two weeks I've spent in Winnipeg marks an accumulated six months I've been in this city alone, stretching back to the mid-90s), but very little worldwide. So please forgive my limited perspective in the claims I'm about to make. Or rather, add a comment and help me fill out this topic further. But here it is: there are simply no lightning storms like those which crackle, explode, dance, shatter, glide and leave the spectator awestruck in Winnipeg, Manitoba. 
The prairies are famous as Big Sky Country. Having grown up in the mountains and hills of BC, it was stunning to me on my first visit to Manitoba to not see the slightest slope to the land, in any direction. Consequently, the sky descends on you like God's palm.
I haven't looked into the science of why this is so, but when thunder and lightning come to this part of the world, it isn't a passing fling. It's a massive, pneumatic orgy in the sky. The titans have hard-ons that make the Eiffel Tower look like a toothpick, and they ain't holding back. There's no virtue in restraint, say the electric prairie clouds. Let's do this, let's do it for real, and let's do it alllll night.
One evening I found myself on the sidewalk, simply beholding the show. Lightning jumped from one cloud to another. And another, and another, and another. You couldn't always see where the lightning leapt from, or leapt to - those points were shrouded by more clouds, which diffused the light enough to make it foggier but no less beautiful or mighty.
I watched the display, which far outstripped anything humans could put on with a measly load from a fireworks barge. I imagined seeing exactly what was before me in a movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, or George Lucas in his obsessed-with-augmenting-everything-with-CGI-at-every-possible-opportunity phase, and saying "come on, give it a rest, that's just not believable." And yet there it was. And it went on. And on. And on.
May it never stop.
