On Autumn and Connections

I seriously can't believe it's the end of October already. Time is such a funny thing isn't it? On the one hand it tends to fly away (especially when you have lots to do, 3 hours a day to accomplish everything you need and a tendency to watch TV instead of work), while on the other hand it takes its time... 
It is our first Autumn here in London (and yes I know it's also Fall, but Autumn sounds so much more romantic don't you think?), and it is nothing like we have ever experienced anywhere else, and everything like you imagine a proper Autumn should be - cold, rainy, and filled with orange-red leaves everywhere. I love it (well, when I am inside the house I do). I fill the house with Autumn appropriate music, eat soup for lunch, and wear all my winter clothes (when winter hits I will need actual winter clothes. Everything I have is Autumn fitting at best).

Kids at the park

One of the main things in Gibraltar we could never get used to is that there are no trees. I mean obviously there is the Rock itself, which has foliage and stuff, but there are no parks, it is not a green place. It is a blue place as it sits just on the Mediterranean and our flat was on the edge of one of the harbours. Don't get me wrong, it was the most beautiful view in the world, and there is nothing like getting a giant tourists cruise-ship just outside your window, but I missed the green and I adore the fact that we now have green everywhere - grass, trees, leaves, parks...
It makes for a great change. 
Though tomorrow things are supposed to get rougher and this is the last above 10 degrees Celsius (50 F) day we will get for a while, so they already shut down the bubbles and lights in our gardens until spring (weird that when they built it they didn't think about the fact that this is London, and the winter here is in a water freezing temperature...), and on Sunday it's the end of Summer Time so it will start getting dark around 5 already. Another change. 
Life is all about that though, don't you think? changes are everywhere and all the time. Maybe not exactly changes, but adaptations. For me at least it seems that it never stays the same. It is never quiet. And when it does, we move :)
For years now Hidai and I have our mutual agreement that the only constant in our life is the being of our family (no more changes there thank you very much). Everything else is under constant movement. 
And it's not just the big things, it can be the way we dress, because they dress differently here - all with the short skirts and tight jeans and knee high boots, and Hidai now has to dress properly for work (not a full suit but close enough), or the holidays we celebrate nowadays, or the fact that the kid's accent is moving more toward the English one I guess, so it's the little things, the ones you don't even notice at first that change. 
One of the changes that happened over the years since we left Israel is realising the importance of connections. Don't get me wrong, we are still unfriendly as ever :) but keeping that in mind, we try harder (again, as all is relative in life, that should probably say relatively harder), or at the very least we acknowledge the fact that we should try harder, because if you don't create your own connections than you sit alone when there is a holiday, or you have no-one to ask if you have some silly questions, and basically you are in charge of not being alone/lonely. I guess It would have been easier if we chose to live in an Israeli or a Jewish community, and I guess that is why most people do, but we chose not to. 
So we are left with the building complex, that does not have a lot of people with kids Ron's age, mostly "young professionals" who leads a life that is so un-similar to ours or parents with their first baby/toddler that keep looking at me funny when they see how I treat Yon's falling down performances (seriously that kid deserves an Oscar or a Brit award for the way he does melodrama-in-the-street), that you just have to patronise and say "fine. You just wait and see", and the nursery/school, in which we have yet to find like-minded souls or people willing to talk to us (hopefully Tyler's mum). 
And so we arrive to family issues, and the fact that Uri & Ev live in London does helps with the holidays (or most of them anyway), but it does not change the fact that their lives are totally different and separate from ours. 
So basically the only people we know in London who lives near us, have kids in similar ages, and are nice (a bonus point), are Jo & Adrie. That's why we totally used the family connection we have through Ev and declared them family :). We had one dinner at their place, 2 dinners at our place (holiday dinners no less), 2 park outing, 2 chance park meetings, one restaurant dinner, one birthday party invite (only Hidai went since that was the week I was ill), and one coffee and play date this past Sunday. (No it is not weird or anything that everything we do is written in the calendar). It feels so good to have people we like to hang out with, that it actually made me realise how much we came to take that for granted in Gibraltar. It did take us a while, but after we found our small but loved group of friends, losing all of them when we moved here was so much harder than we anticipated, and Jo & Adrie are making this loss and loneliness a little bit easier for us.