Montreal

Montreal was an unexpected place to me. It was a city I knew existed, somewhere in Canada, but until two days before I arrived that was all I knew about it. I was sent there for two weeks as part of a job I was working on at the time, and it was a last minute thing so I didn't really know what to expect. Montreal is one of my favourite places in North America. The city is a cross between Paris and New York, it has quaint little streets and expensive French restaurants, as well as a thriving business and industrial economy, great nightlife, busy shopping and a real buzz to the place. Montreal is definitely a place I would visit again sometime, the mix of French and American culture cannot be found anywhere else.

This is the Sun Life Tower, once the largest building in the British Empire, very representative of the architecture in Montreal from the early part of the 20th century.

This picture is from the top of Mount Royal, after which the city is named. Although it was the height of summer the weather was not always fantastic as you can see here.

As part of the job I was doing at the time, we had a visit to the container port of Montreal. The loaders you see here were capable of grabbing 40 foot containers at each end off the back of a truck. Watching them at work was like watching dinosaurs in the Flintstones.

Here is the IBM building in downtown Montreal. I took this out of my hotel room window, I had a good view over the south part of the city centre.

Montreal's Olympic Stadium boasts the world's tallest inclined tower at 175m. It was built for the games in 1976, not long after the city hosted the Commonwealth games in 1967. This shot was taken from a container ship superstructure in the port of Montreal.