We have come to an understanding as to why things feel a bit weird here.
Basically, we arrived in Autumn, the leaves were falling from the trees, well, from the trees that lose their leaves in the Autumn. We mentioned way back, a lot of the trees here dont lose their leaves, they lose their bark.
During winter, there continued to be a steady stream of trees losing their leaves.
And through spring. When the trees that had held on to their leaves grew new ones and ditched the old ones.
And now its summer, there are still leaves on the ground.
I took these pictures this morning.
You can see the green all around in the background of the second, but the leaves are on the ground.
Add to this that the latest the sun goes down is 8:30. Tonight sundown was 8:17pm, and it gets dark pretty fast – no hour long twilights here. (and thats only this year, they are most likely to refuse Daylight Savings in a referendum next year and wont change the clocks, so it will be dark at 7:30pm at the height of summer)
So….. it gets dark fairly early, and there are leaves on the ground.
It feels like the longest autumn EVER! It feels like a seven month autumn with some really cold and wet days and some really dry and warm days.
Its all a bit strange!