Whats the date? What's the time?

Apart from the altitude problem, that leaves you tired and out of breath and spaced out at the end of day...... Ethiopia also has another element to confuse you even more...

Ask any ethiopian at the end of a long day what is the time, and he will nicely tell you 1 o'clock in the afternoon, you stand there pretty confused looking at the sky seeing that the sun is no longer there but it is dark and the moon is shining! So you ask yourself how could it be 1 o'clock, apart from the fact that it is not afternoon anymore, you've also done your fair share of a day's work!!!

Well, Ethiopia works on a different clock! They have the reasoning that the day starts at sun rise (our 6am), while we have the reasoning that a day starts at midnight (00.00). Therefore our 6am becomes their 00.00.

Which makes it quite confusing as when i leave work at 7pm it would be 1pm Ethiopian timing, it took me quite a while to figure this out, especially once i don't have the habit of carrying a watch with me!

Furthermore Ethiopia decided that it does not want to have months that have different days, but it wants all its months to have equal amount of days, thus leaving it with 12 months of 30 days and one more month of 7 days. So we are also 7 days back with the rest of the world as well as 8yrs back!

Thus today, being the 6 July of 2005 in my calendar, in Ethiopian calendar it is the 29th of June 1997!! Try getting used to that!!!

So that makes me a total of 6hrs, 7 days and 8yrs backwords to the world i was used to!!!!

Thank God we don't use the Ethiopian system at work.... but all the newspapers and other out of work places use the Ethiopian calander and timing.....