Over the course of our many trips to Montréal, the city has become a beloved second home to us. Here's a brief overview.

Upon first impression, Montréal has the flavor of a European city: majestically old-world and perhaps more formal than any other city in North America. The impression comes from visiting Old Montréal, the first and sometimes the only neighborhood tourists see. Old Montréal, with its Parisian paradox of narrow alleys and large neo-Gothic buildings on the St. Lawrence River, looks like, and is equally as beautiful as, the city on the Seine. You shouldn't miss Old Montréal -- and it's part of our walking tour on Saturday afternoon, August 31.

The rest of Montréal couldn't be more different. Our favorite neighborhood, and the favorite of many native Montréalers, is Plateau Mont-Royal. Simply called "The Plateau" by locals, it was voted one of the 15 hippest neighborhoods in North America. We put it in the top five.

The Plateau has an electic array of fun stores, trendy shops, colorful cafes and Montréal's finest restaurants. Combine King's Road in Chelsea, London with the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Rue St-Denis is the essence of The Plateau. Walk the first 10 blocks on rue St-Denis north beginning at Sherbrooke, and The Plateau's eye and mouth candy is all yours. Montréal's topography is an easy compass, by the way. North is up the hill.

As if The Plateau already didn't offer enough -- Dayenu! -- it also has vestiges of Montréal's old Jewish community, which has since moved to the now predominantly Jewish neighborhoods of Westmount and Côte St-Luc, and in far greater numbers to Toronto.

The Plateau's rue St-Laurent, once Montréal's main street and still called "The Main" by locals, is home to Schwartz's Deli, famous across Canada as the leading restaurant for Montréal Smoked Meat. Flavored somewhere in between corned beef and pastrami, it is sensational. Montréal Smoked Meat will be featured at the After-Party that Aunt Thea Flaum and Bob Hill are hosting at the Omni on Sunday night, September 1.

Off rue St-Laurent is the St-Viateur Bagel Shop, to which we directly drive from the airport whenever we visit Montréal. Montrealers believe St-Viateur makes the best bagels in Montréal, and that Montréal makes the best bagels in the world -- even better than New York's. That is a painful but necessary admission for one of us to make. Montréal bagels, made with honey water and cooked in a wood-fired brick oven, are crunchier, sweeter and more addictive than their New York counterparts.

Because we love you and want you to share in our little bite of heaven, St-Viateur bagels will be on the buses from Montréal to Vermont on Sunday, September 1. Anglophones and most customers, incidentally, pronounce it Vee-AY-ter and not the French Vee-ah-TOOR.

Downtown Montréal is where Celebrating 10 is based. Rue Sherbrooke, the main street of Downtown, evokes Michigan Avenue in Chicago. At the core of Downtown, called the Golden Square Mile because of its affluence, lay the Musée des beaux-arts, prestigious McGill University, the Hotel Omni Mont-Royal and the other recommended hotels of Celebrating 10.

Downtown is also home to much of Montréal's nightlife, concentrated on two streets: Crescent Street, which abuts one side of the Musée des beaux-arts, and rue Ste-Catherine, one of the city's major boulevards. Think Chicago's Rush and Division Streets at night.

By day, Crescent Street and rue Ste-Catherine have a different flair, marked by classic downtown shopping. Crescent Street, with one elegant boutique after another, feels like Oak Street in Chicago. The always bustling rue Ste-Catherine, with its larger stores and indoor malls, is more crowded and unordered, like Herald Square in New York.

No matter what store or restaurant in Montréal you visit, by the way, you'll have no language barrier. Though two-thirds of the city's residents are Francophones -- those for whom French is their first language -- and one-third is Anglophone, nearly everyone speaks English and French. Montréal is a thoroughly and comfortably bilingual city, however much other parts of Québec province may not be.

Geographically, Downtown Montréal is misnamed. If "downtowns" mean they're at one end of a city or another, Downtown Montréal, in contrast, is fairly much in the center. To give you a visual sense, picture a hill with three ascending layers. At the bottom, which abuts the water, is Old Montréal. The middle level upward is Downtown. And upward from there is The Plateau. No wonder Downtown Montréal is called "Centre-Ville" in French. We don't want to overdo the hill image, though. Montréal is hardly as steep as, and far bigger than, say, Haifa.

It dawns on us, now, that many of our references have been to places Jewish. That means either Montréal is a heck of a lot more Jewish than most people think, or you're experiencing a travelogue through your guides' Ashkenasic kaleidoscope on life. Actually, after reading the initial draft of this, Daniel told Steven that he, Steven, is the only person on earth who could make Montréal, the most Catholic city in North America, sound like the Knesset.

That's not fair. Have we not gone into detail about our patron saint, St-Viateur? Okay, okay. Let's mention two things in Montréal that aren't Jewish. Notre-Dame Basilica, located in Old Montréal, and Céline Dion. She got married at the Basilica, one of the world's most massive cathedrals and an unequivocal must-see. We hear it's beautiful.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program. The city seems like Eretz Montréal for a reason. Montréal has 1.8 million residents, of whom 1/3 are Anglophones. Of those 600,000 Anglophones, approximately 100,000 are Jewish. That 1 in 6 proportion, or 17 percent, is not much lower than the 22 percent of New York City that's Jewish. Thirty to 40 years ago, when Montréal's Jewish population was closer to 150,000, Anglophone Montréal would have been, as a city of its own, the most Jewish city in the diaspora.

Today, Montréal's Jewish population, which left for Toronto in droves when the Québec separatist revolution began in the 1960s, is showing new signs of life. At a political nadir are Québec's separatism and the anti-semitism laced in it. Conversely, the merger of Montréal's Jewish suburbs into the city proper last year changed the landscape to elect Montréal's first new mayor in years -- and he is supportive of the Jewish community. The city is even has new Jewish immigrants: Francophones from Morocco who own many of the Moroccan restaurants in The Plateau.

Going from the west side of Montréal, which encompasses most of Downtown, and then across the city to the east side, you'll find the Gay Village. It's one of the most vibrant lesbian and gay neighborhoods in any city.

Yet the Gay Village is not as upscale as gay neighborhoods elsewhere have become. It's not as trendy as New York's Chelsea nor as quaint as Toronto's Queen Street. But what the Gay Village doesn't have in affluence, it makes up for in a Castro Street-like intensity. As with the Castro in San Francisco, Montréal's Gay Village seems to be celebrated officially by city government. The metro station in the Gay Village features a rainbow glass design.

The Province of Québec, moreover, is one of the most progressive places in the world for gaies et lesbiennes. In 1999, Québec enacted a provincial law that gives same-sex couples comprehensive domestic partnership rights similar to those under Vermont's Civil Union law, enacted in 2000.

Straight Montrealers, we've found, are downright proud of the city's lesbian and gay community -- specifically of how the community has improved the Gay Village for everyone. In fact, the city conducted an aggressive campaign for the 2006 Gay Games, and won them! You're welcome to join us in Montréal for Celebrating 14.

To get to the Gay Village, take the metro to Beaudry station or ride 10 minutes by cab to the corners of rue Beaudry and rue Ste-Catherine Est.

So there it is, our wonderful Montréal. Exciting, magnificent, gustatorily stupendous and ever-more progressive. We're in love.