Toric varieties have constituted  for a while now one of the most useful families of varieties in both algebraic and symplectic geometry, as they are varieties in which a lot of what one would like to know is computable in terms of a rational polytope. It turns out that these varieties are more general than one would think, at least as degenerations of other varieties. As an example, I will discuss moduli of holomorphic bundles on a Riemann surface.