Want to know when you begin to cross over from being a tourist to becoming a traveler?

It’s not when your first passport arrives in the mail, nor even when an immigration officer in a foreign country stamps that passport for the very first time.

It starts the moment you pick up the rhythm of life in a different place, and realize that it is also your rhythm. The moment when something in these streets, these places, these faces and voices, resonates with you in ways the travel agent back home never told you about.

“You know what?” you tell yourself. “I could live here.”

And your self doesn’t argue.

That’s when it happens.

If you’ve traveled at all in your life, there’s a good chance you’ve already got your own list of such places in in your memory.

This is mine:

NEW ORLEANS
Technically, this is cheating, since I actually did live here once. Whatever. I’ll just sue myself for an obscene sum of money and go do comedy shows in the Midwest.

What the hell, it worked for Charlie Sheen…and I’m sober.

I have a kind of love/hate/indifferent relationship with New Orleans. Sometimes, I love it. Sometimes, I hate it.

The NOLA? It doesn’t give a damn either way.

In its personality, the city is a bit like the significant other who has an unfailing ability to drive you crazy, in both good and bad ways.

Heat, humidity, pounding rain, high crime and all manner of low people in high places — New Orleans is at time aggravating enough to make the Bible’s Job go postal.

Then you sample the food, the drink, the music. You get a feel of the human spirit in the city that created all that. You walk through Audubon Park. You ride the St. Charles streetcar. You jog along the top of a levee, stroll in the shade of oaks and magnolias and willows.

And you wonder why you’d want to live anywhere else.

New Orleans may be big, but she’s hardly easy, and if you fall in love with her, it will be strictly on her terms.

NEW YORK
The first time you touch down in New York City, you understand why this had to be the United Nations headquarters.

The whole world is already here.

It’s got a rhythm, a pulse, a heart rate which, in a human being, might be cause for a trip to the hospital. When you find it in a city, it’s energizing. It lifts you up and gets you going, if only to keep you from getting run over by all those New Yorkers coming up behind you on the sidewalk.

New York is the guy in the park, jogging at a pace obviously faster than yours, who silently challenges you to keep up. You may or may not succeed, but you benefit a lot just by trying.

But all that is Manhattan, just one of the five boroughs that comprise New York City — Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island — each with its own vibe. And within each borough, multiple neighborhoods of individual personalities.

I’ve got a lot more of NYC left to get to know.

SAN FRANCISCO
The city with the conceit to think of itself as “The City” — and the beauty, romance and vibrance to vindicate all that attitude — is a bit of a tease.

There are two places in the world where you need to a see a sunset before you die. Key West is one. This is the other. Whether from the top of Coit Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge or the middle of San Francisco Bay on Treasure Island, it really doesn’t matter.

Not a lot of malls in this town, but a lot of commercial streets, packed block after block with little shops and restaurants of every cuisine, ethnicity and price range.

Right around the corner from these streets are neighborhoods that let you actually walk to do your shopping. It’s incredibly civilized.

But if you entertain the thought of actually living in one of those neighborhoods, the reality of the cost-of-living in San Francisco slaps you in the face like…well…a slap in the face!

VANCOUVER
Take all the beauty and charm of San Francisco. Subtract The City’s preening self-consciousness. Add the traditionally laid-back attitudes of Marin County or Santa Fe, NM.

Vancouver is more or less what you get.

Vancouver is so pristine that it feels more like a movie set that real people happen to live in. You have to work to find a neighborhood that doesn’t give you an oh-my-God! view of mountains or water or both.

How many other big cities in North America can you go down to a waterside park and watch airplanes take off from and land on a gorgeous bay, with occasional stops at a floating gas station? Even the airport’s on an island.

We won’t even get into the ferry runs between Vancouver and Victoria. What the rest of the world would call a scenic cruise, these folks call a commute.

It’s not just the view. People in Vancouver at times seem almost impossibly nice. Up there, rudeness marks you as a visitor, most likely from the States. It’s also extremely bike-friendly.

I’m almost afraid to sleep in Vancouver, lest I find out the whole thing was just a dream…and I wake up in Los Angeles.

LONDON
Hyper-tense, but in a good way. New York’s equivalent in terms of pace and energy, minus the collective neurosis. A sprawling world capital, but built to a human scale, for people, not cars.

Spend one day navigating around via the London Underground, aka “the Tube,” and you feel as if you own the whole town.

Just “mind the gap.”

Fresh and familiar all at once. Everything old and everything new. History and happenings, all wrapped up in the same 24/7 package. You always get the feeling that something cool is always happening somewhere — just around the way or outside the next Tube stop.

Plugging yourself into the rhythm of this global capital is easy; the hard part comes when you have to disconnect.

London just might not let you.

The major downside: You may have to rob several banks — or own one — to afford to live here.

PARIS
All big cities on the planet, no where where you find them, share one quality. Turn off almost any of their huge, sprawling, impersonal, traffic-clogged “grand boulevards” and you’re liable to find, within a block or two, a quiet, livable neighborhood.

It’s just that Paris seems to have more of them than anywhere else.

This is a city where people just know how to live. You find a cafe with the vibe that suits you and you make it your second home, your detached living room, dining room, parlor. You linger over lunch, a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. You check out the passing parade. You talk, discuss, debate, argue.

When you don’t feel like sitting, you stroll the parks, you stroll the Seine. Peruse a newsstand, browse a bookshop. You savor the string of good moments.

In between, you work and sleep.

Yeah, I could do that.

For all its history, attractions and charms, the biggest draw in Paris for me is that it seems to be a city whose people have their priorities straight. Life, and loving life, come first.

It’s no accident that I prefer staying in apartments over hotels when I’m in Paris. Perhaps more than any other metropolis in the world, you want to feel like you live here.

That’s my list.

What’s yours?

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