I really do love Toronto.  I've never been anywhere else that has such a riot of cultures all flowing (relatively) smoothly along beside each other.  Faces on the subway are so varied that it seems like a United Nations meeting.  There's every type of restaurant you can imagine and quite a few you wouldn't have thought of (Kosher Chinese-American being one of my favourites).

Today Soni and I went out to buy a couch, we moved recently, and we sold the old, couch and love-seat with the intention to buy something smaller for the new, much smaller place... it's been 21 days without a place to sit, so we decided today was the day.  We bought the old couches at "Fair Deal" furniture, mostly because we were on our way to Leons and it happened to be next door (Soni had seen an advertisement for it on the tubes and recognised the name).  The old couches sold for just $100 less than we bought them after a year of use, though they were a bit of a steal when we bought them, so it wasn't an insanely high price.

Anyway, we TTC'd it up (note on loving Toronto; I love Toronto, I love the subway part of the TTC, but the people planning the TTC's bus routes need someone to sit down and explain that having 3 busses running along together is the worst possible arrangement) to the middle of nowhere (401 & Jane) and trekked in along the un-cleared sidewalk (Soni taking pictures of a beautiful little stream on the way) to our little out-of-the-way and unknown gem of a furniture store.

Where dozens and dozens of cars were parked.

Our previous visit had our car and the salesperson's car in the lot.  I think one other couple might have showed up while we were wandering around.  This looked like a Christmas feeding frenzy, more people than you could imagine some poor beleagured salesperson possibly servicing in days.  The cars in the lot were 2 or 3 deep, so people would have to wait for each other to leave before they could pull out.  Whatever this sale was, it must be driving people *mad*!

We girded our shopping loins and mounted the steps... to find a "Closed" sign.  Sure enough, it was 12:55 and the sign said they'd open at 13:00, as there was a private function.  We went in and started shopping, seeing the huge crowd of people at the rear, but just quietly going about our couch-testing.  The meeting broke up and smiling people started passing us on their way out, then Jay (who seems apologetic about the people, for some reason) came over to help us.  Knowing how picky we are, we just told him we'd let him know when we decided.  He was very apologetic about the meeting for some reason.

We spent an hour or two sitting, commenting and eventually selecting a reasonably-priced 2-seater couch then called Jay over to close the deal.  As we walked over to the cash, however, we realized we hadn't seen any of the stuff in the back half of the show-room, so we abandonned poor Jay and wandered through the back half of the show-room, then back out checking each of the maybes we'd previously decided against before we finally got back to Jay.

As I was paying, Soni wandered off while I discussed the previous couch and how well it had done on resale value (Jay even looked up the sales slip so he could see what type of couch it was).  She wandered back and made an offhand comment about the lovely scents coming from the back room.

Jay offered us lunch.

I really do love Toronto.  We had a lovely Indian curry with people who were genial and friendly hosts, making every effort to make us comfortable.  The community was generous and kind, and the food was easily the equal of any I've had at a restaurant.  Humanity is a wonderful thing.