I'm currently in a 12 story rental with a half dozen apartments on each floor. For the most part it's pretty friendly people, and even though I haven't really made the effort to get to know anyone in my building the three years I've lived here, the small talk on the elevator and in the entrace is generally very pleasant. My floor is generally quiet compared to others in the building. There is frequent turnover of folks given the amount of moving you see at the beginning/end of every month. I think this is a place that people stay a short time, while they are transitioning elsewhere, although there is a lovely elderly woman with a bicycle on the first floor who appears to have lived here for years and years.

It's an extremely diverse neighbourhood that is bordered by the University of Toronto to the south, the tremendously upscale Yorkville to the east and Koreatown to the west. We're a stones throw to Little Italy (which has been abandoned by the Italians and replaced by trendy upscale bars/restaurants and the Portuguese), and Chinatown.

You can get pretty much any ethnic cuisine under the sun you can imagine on the main commercial strip, although we seem to have much more sushi places than any other neighbourhood in TO. We have students, mansions, soup kitches, churches of all kinds, old fashion boarding houses, group homes, many small dog parks, frat houses, families, singles, couples, upscale homes, low income housing, expensive private schools, vocational institutes, and people of all colors and sizes here.

This is the neighborhood that managed to successfully battle Starbucks and save a locally owned coffee shop. I can describe all the homeless that live on the main street and they have always appeared to exist in this eco-system where many of them are provided for by the shopkeepers.

We have one of the very few small mom and pop hardware stores left in the downtown core.

It was once a Hungarian neighbourhood and there is only one restaurant that remains. It serves a meat platter for four people with a half dozen different items including veal, sausage or pork that is a foot high and held together by knives pressed into the top of the stack. My former roommate used to pick up items at the Hungarian deli for her mother before it closed down. I always wondered why Hungarian chocolate had a picture of a cow holding a shovel on it's packaging. I'm not sure where the Hungarian community went to.

There was a large building that was just a burnt out husk filled with urban legends surrounding why such a huge potentially profitable storefront has remained empty for over twenty years. Recently renovations began on it and a used bookstore will open there. Apparently the former owner, an eccentric elderly Hungarian woman recently passed away.

I've very rarely been told to take off my rollerblades in the local shops. I think it might be the fact that I've been rolling into the same places for a decade now and it's what they are accustomed to.

There is a small grocery store that closed down last week that prided itself with ALWAYS being open (except for the black out a couple of years ago) for the last twenty years or so... to the point where there are no locks on the doors.

I always flirt with the girls at the post office at the back of the drug store.

My favourite place to eat for most of the time I was here is a Montreal style deli that is run by a family consisting of 28 kids, most of whom were adopted from third world contries. They have smoked meat, montreal bagels, fresh OJ, sour pickles and my favourite meal there is a large plate of Poutine with shredded smoked meat on top.

We have two of the best ice cream places in town that serves vastly different kinds of hand-made, gourmet Ice Cream. It's usually a toss-up between a scoop of Roasted Marshmallow at the place inside the Jewish Community Centre, or Birthday Cake flavour at the one operating out of a window of a house.

I've lived here for ten years and I have loved every minute of it and have a very hard time seeing myself living anywhere else.

At one glorious point, all of my closest friends lived in this neighbourhood. All of them moved away when they got married and couldn't afford to buy here. One of my best friends left a month ago after purchasing a fixer-uper and proposing to his longtime girlfriend.



In 25 days I take possession of my stacked townhome condo located uptown where there is much less diversity in terms of the cultural and socio-economic range of people I will encounter on a daily basis.