As the leaves change colour, so changes the season

The leaves on the trees are beginning to fall and change colour here. The air is becoming a bit more crisp and cool, yet the temperature is about the same. 

I've noticed there's a slightly funny little ritual that people do at the end of phone calls. Each person on the phone says "bye" twice, and if it goes perfectly, you VERY quickly alternate between each person. The second "bye" has a slightly higher tone to it as well.

In the states, we have a few different accents, I'd say it's probably northern, southern, central, you might toss in Boston, New York, New Jersey and maybe North Dakota and Wisconsin as unique accents or dialects. Now that I write those out, I guess we have quite a few. I'm noticing quite a few accents in the UK too, over very small areas. There's definitely a northern/southern, but there's something in Wales/central too. In just 6 months of listening, it almost feels like each major town has it's own accent/dialect. If you google "accent and dialogue map USA" (or UK), there are great ones out there. These accents are important to know because there are helpful ways to shift your wording, and even thinking, when building relationships.

Strange thing happened yesterday, I was driving to work and a guy in a suit on a bike hit my side mirror with his handle bars. He immediately raised his hand, said some kind of apology and kept going. I guess it was no harm no foul. Most of the roads have marked areas for bikes, and if there's a traffic light, there's often a marked space up front for bikes. So I guess the bumping of cars and cyclists must actually be fairly common. 

I've been invited to a formal dinner event. It's not called "renting a tux", it's called "hiring a dinner jacket", in fact the stores call it a DJ (which is even more confusing :) ). Oh, on a side note, we don't call them sneakers or tennis shoes here, we call them trainers. It cost me around £80 to get the full tuxedo, ahem dj, which sounded about right to me. My trainers actually have US and UK sizes written in them, so it was easy to share those with the tailor. UK sizes tend to be one number lower than US sizes, for example a 12 shoe is an 11 shoe. A 17 neck for a shirt in the US, is a 16 in the UK.

It's now Sunday morning and I'm going to make the same French toast I made yesterday. It's a recipe from Gordon Ramsey, so of course it's amazing. It's called Eggy Bread w Sugared Apples. You hear up some sugar, toss in some butter, then chopped up apples with the skin. Then you slice French bread, dunk it in pretty standard French toast batter (eggs, cinnamon, sugar, milk) and you're good to go, delicious!