Toronto... alas.

Here's a telling article about Toronto:

Why, in diverse Toronto, do different generations barely mix?

There's one element missing from Toronto's diversity — active social interaction between young and old such as communities elsewhere in the world take for granted.

I'd add nobody socializes out of their caste there, however self-identified.  My sister-in-law pointed out  to me that all North American cities are like this, though I think she meant all Anglophone North American cities.  (She's also lived in New York).  And she added that it is worse outside the urban centres, by which I think she meant the suburbs: people mix across ages in the rural areas as there is nobody else...

She may be accurately damning English N. America by saying Toronto is no worse... Tokyo people stay in their own niches too, unless out drinking, which people do much more in Tokyo than Toronto. Come to think of it, people go out to drink and eat much more in Montreal also, and have wider circles of friends, and Montreal, like Tokyo, is an interesting city.  Toronto never will be. That's it, Anglos: drink more!

This thinking falls down, so to speak, when you know that Torontontians get falling-down-drunk only with people of their own tribe: jocks, Italian immigrants, whatever.  It reminds me that at every pub I have been to in England someone struck up a conversation.  Granted, I was a thirty-year-old travelling with his mother, which is odd, our accents were different, and it must have helped we are white.  Torontonians uniquely suck, even drunk?  True enough.  Maybe it is the lack of common 'social drinking', of which there is more in Montreal, Europe and in Japan - Japanese cannot hold enough for it to be more than 'social drinking'.  I am inclined to think this is it.  Torontonians are frosty, and aren't lit enough, often enough, to break the ice with any charm before they are so drunk to be belligerent or bores.