However, in China’s far west it’s still 1pm, but just over the border in India it’s only 10am (or usually 10:30am, because India uses half-hour time zone rules. What does this mean? Well, when it’s 1pm on China’s eastern coast, it’s also 1pm in the nearby Philippines.

This makes everything confusing because there are actually four time zones existing between the far west and far east of China, despite there only being one zone for the whole of China itself. For example, North America, Africa, Russia and Australia split their land mass up into different time zones (the East Coast of the US is three hours ahead the West Coast), but China, India and Argentina don’t. Life would be much easier if the world had time zones that ran in straight lines – but when is life ever simple? To make things more complicated than they probably should be, some big countries don’t split their time zones even though the countries and continents around them do. This would explain why Portugal is the same time zone as the UK, despite being in the same actual place as Spain. Meanwhile, Spanish dictator Franco changed the time to an hour ahead in Spain too. France, Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium were all originally in the same time zone as the UK, but Germany changed their time to match the German zone (one hour ahead of the UK) during their occupation of those countries during the war. The time UK and Europe SHOULD be the sameĪmongst many things the Second World War messed up, one of them was the time zones between the UK and the rest of Europe. It’s pretty much the Inception of solar activity.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?! Well, France is in a time zone that’s one hour ahead of the UK but geographically it’s slightly to the east, meaning the sunset actually reaches Paris before it reaches London, even though it exists in a time that’s later than the UK, so it’s already later when the sun sets. This is especially strange because the two cities are not that far apart. Let’s start with a fact that blew my mind: the sun sets in Paris simultaneously earlier and later than in London. With that in mind, here are six crazy facts about time zones that every world traveler (or wannabe world traveler) should know: 1. Despite confusing the hell out of everyone, time zones are totally necessary and essential to daily life. How many times have you boarded a flight at 2pm on a Tuesday and landed at 6pm the same day even though you’ve been in the air for NINE HOURS? I know I have. The geographically correct position is about 100 meters further east.Time zones make logical sense, but they can also be really annoying. In the courtyard of the historic Royal Greenwich Observatory, a brass strip and a laser beam symbolize the zero meridian. Previously, numerous coordinate systems competed with each other. Only with this worldwide uniform regulation did the coordinates we know today exist. When the date line was established in a preferably uninhabited area between Asia and America, the zero meridian was established on the opposite side of the globe in Greenwich. Each section of 15° corresponded to one hour, which, at least in theory, resulted in 24 uniform time zones. It was not until 1884 that a globally uniform time system was agreed upon, dividing the globe into 24 equal-sized areas according to their longitudes. One of the best known was already based on the Greenwich meridian. Origin of the Greenwich Mean Time During seafaring times, there were different zero meridians and systems for position calculation depending on the nation. Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha

Gmt 1 time zone