You remember how I said that a second is a second and a minute is a minute in my last post? In Ethiopia, an hour is an hour but once it gets to days, things change up a bit. Its kinda cool how this country can change how they measure time. The day starts around sunrise (which is equivalent to what I'd call 6am). So, when my phone tells me 7am, most of their phones would say 1am. Lunch is around 6am and supper around 12am. 11pm for them is 5 am for me and so on. I'm not sure if they change their date at my midnight or if they wait for daybreak to say its the next day. It took me forever to realize that all the clocks in businesses and vehicles that I saw weren't broken! Seriously-- it took me until December to figure that one out even though I knew about the different way of measuring. It just took me awhile to put it all together.
Months are also different. One of the touristy taglines for posters advertising Ethiopia is "Thirteen months of sunshine." Twelve months of the year have 30 days and the thirteenth has 5 or 6, depending on the year. It gets even trickier. Their New Year starts around September 11 on my calendar so their new months are half way through our months. And it doesn't stop there! Right now, its 2006 here. My receipts are stamped with 2006-- it always gives me a double take. As far as I know, the years have the same amount of days as our calendar does.
Isn't that cool?! It totally plays with my mind, but I think its neat that there is a country in the world (maybe more than one for all I know) that measures time different than me. So many different things in the world!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Wow! Being a computer programmer, I've dealt with my fair share of trickiness surrounding the concept of "time". At Winnipeg Transit, they used to count days as overlapping periods of 27 hours, and still do in a few places. This Ethiopian time, however, just makes me want to cry. Absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless the stuff of nightmares.
ReplyDelete