JAN 11 CONFUSING TIME ZONES EXPLAINED

JAN 11  CONFUSING TIME ZONES EXPLAINED

Happy New Year from the DUNER BLOG! Every New Year's Eve, the staff gets together at the San Francisco HQ to watch each time zone celebrate on the news. It starts at 3:00 am - that's when folks in Samoa light off the very first fireworks. At six, we watch Sydney Harbour awash in colour, then at ten o'clock it's Hong Kong Harbour. The real party starts at 9:00 pm, when the ball drops at Times Square, NYC. During the day, we discover some really curious time zones around the world. Here are five:

SAMOA: UTC +14:00. Up until the year 2011, Samoa was on the last nation to celebrate a new year. See, the island nation is only 100 miles west of the International Date Line. This causes Samoa problems, as they are a day behind their top business partner, Australia. The solution? Bend the date line. Together with neighboring Kiribati, they cancelled December 30th, 2011 and jumped a day forward.

INDIA: UTC +5:30. During colonial times, there were three time zones in India: Two, Bombay Time and Calcutta Time, were an hour apart. The third, Madras Time, is in between these two meridians. Therefore, it was a half hour off. This worked for sailors, but when railways crisscrossed India it became a problem. People didn't know if a train was on Bombay, Madras or Calcutta time. So it was decided India would have ONE time zone. Logically, the one in the middle was the one selected. A nation is allowed to choose their time zone, and it's stuck around ever since.

NEPAL: UTC + 5:45. Travelers joke it's best not to observe India's half-hour time zone. Why? Because Indians are always thirty minutes late! So does that mean that the Nepalese...the only country in the world with a 45 minute increment...are even later than Indians?? Nope. It's because the Kingdom has always set their watches around when it's noon at Gaurishankar, a sacred Himalayan peak.

CHINA: UTC + 8:00. The People's Republic likes things uniform, so it comes as no surprise they too only have one time zone. The problem is that the PRC is much larger than India. For comparison, the 48 contiguous US states is the same size as China. However, we have four time zones. As expected, one gigantic time zone creates odd occurrences. For example, in summer, the sun sets a midnight in Xinjiang. As a quiet protest, the Uighur people who live there use common sense and adhere to their actual time zone.

NEWFOUNDLAND: UTC -3:30. The Western Hemisphere has surprisingly normal time zones, logically following lines of latitude. Except for Newfoundland. Like India, they are a half hour off. It too dates to the British colonial period, when the ports of St. John's were thirty minutes ahead of Quebec. When time zones were first drawn up in 1885, Newfoundland was not part of Canada and chose to keep their zone. The independent-minded colony was the last province to join Canada in 1933. Despite pressure from Ottawa, they grudgingly keep their odd time zone.