It depends on what aspect of a place makes me want to return to it. Was it nice for living in alone, or raising a family? Chilling? Being mind-blown every moment? Feeling connected to a better reality? Feeling like I could grow into a better person from surviving it?

My all-time favorite place is Montreal. It's probably because I went there without any great idea what to do, and found that it was the perfect place to hang out cheaply while working on a language learning curve. Its very neurosis infected me with purpose.

I had taken French in school for five years. I aced it, but then again I love languages. I also had nothing that made me think France was worth the effort. They'd play us bad music and have us read old advertising with terrible graphic design. They'd tell us we could never really get the accents right. Oh yeah, sold. You can keep your accordions.

Then I wound up in Montreal after a train ride from New York City on Saint Patrick's Day, 1998. I dropped my bags at a hostel and found a drunken party about a block away.

The next week was a blur of discovery. I walked around a lot, rode the metro all over, and saw a lot of trilingual bums. I also saw apartments for rent at really good rates. I couldn't read everything, but I quickly wanted to devour the place.

Here was an alive francophone culture, making up words that beat the English ones. Here was a story of North America that seemed nothing like the one I grew up with only five hours away in upstate New York. I saw huge billboard ads for musicians that couldn't get arrested an hour down the road in Plattsburgh.

Here were Nietzsche's Hyperboreans, the people beyond the north wind. They weren't afraid of winter, and they would fight every step of the way for a place most people didn't want. They had great junk food, writers, barristas... the works. I wanted to move there right away. I wanted to start traveling a whole lot more, to make I wasn't delusional.

Eventually I got to travel a lot more. I went to Belgium twice, a place that has a similar story but is in hibernation. I spent a month in France, which was very different from its external reputation and very worth traveling but also trying to figure out how to accept the rest of Europe.

I also went to Austin, Australia, a lot of the eastern seaboard of the US, Tucson, San Francisco, England, and the Netherlands. I drove from Boston (my home for a dozen years) to Los Angeles (where I have now lived for two years).

Still, I've never felt more at home than I do every time I'm in Montreal. It just clicks for me. I've taken my dad there twice and he understood what I loved: that connection between language and the Canadian culture. (Canada, especially the ROC (rest of Canada), doesn't think it has a culture and drives itself nuts trying to figure one out. It's the anthropological and sociological version of a barely legal teen.)

Too bad my wife doesn't speak French. Too bad I don't feel the same connection to the Hispanic culture of Los Angeles, much as I like it. It's like Navin's moment of whiteness in The Jerk: those are my people, and I want to see them prosper.