"A Characterful Canadian City..." a Montreal Travel Page by johngayton

As a simple country boy I do enjoy my occasional forays to the big cities and some I enjoy more than others. It may be a bit of a well-worn cliche but what I love about cities (in very short doses!) is the way that a city has an identity of its own, like the vertebrate animals, each with their own almost identical internal organs, bone-structure and muscalature, but yet each genus differentiated by important factors such as habitat or place on the food-chain plus minor factors such as colourings, markings and size.

Cities can be big, bold and brassy, much like the male lion who doesn't actually do anything more than be "big, bold and brassy". Cities can also be compact, unassuming and introvert, much like the lioness whose subtleties allow her to make her kills to feed her young without any need to make a great fuss about it.

Now I'm not one to make value judgements on places, and certainly not on the basis of a day or two's visit and so I'm not going to enter Montreal into my 2nd favourite city league table as yet but suffice it to say that "I Like Montreal"!!

I like the way that Montreal combines its new city with its old and whilst attempting to delineate at the border where the red street signs take over from the white doesn't actually really happen, except perhaps for the most blinkered of visitor. Every city has its old and new, though for some of those blitzed in recent wars the old is but a miniscule remnant whilst others delight in their lack of modernity. Not so here in Montreal, this is a city of definitely 3-Dimensions.

To be cont...........