This video was made possible by The Crew 2, a new open-world racing game from Ubisoft.
More about that after the video.
Time is something that none of us can escape from and all of us around the world live with different times and different schedules.
Planning these times and schedules can get complicated when you board a plane or travel some other way between different time zones. Like when you
fly between New York City and Los Angeles, where you would have to adjust your clock back 3 hours upon arriving in LA.
But some other trips around the world can get way more complicated than that,
thanks to how badly we've messed around with the global time zones. In a perfect world,
our planet would be divided between 24 equal time zones, each representing one hour of the day. But we don't live in that world.
We live in a world where countries,
borders and politics exist that have horribly skewed this perfect ideal into something that looks more like this. And here are the most extreme
examples of the oddities you can find using this map.
Let's start off with Spain, which despite being in the same general longitude as Britain,
Ireland and Portugal, remains one hour ahead of those countries.
This means that you can fly from London and travel west to Madrid, and still have to move your clock one hour ahead
instead of backwards.
The reason that's the case is because Francisco Franco said so back in
1940 when he moved Spain's time ahead an hour to be closer to Nazi Germany, and over 70 years later,
they've still just decided to never change it back. And speaking of countries that have made questionable decisions regarding their time zones,
China is probably the weirdest.
Normally, China is large enough to cover five different time zones in the ideal world.
But in reality, the Chinese government has decided that all of China is just simply 1 time zone that follows Beijing time.
They did this in an attempt to create a sense of national unity across the country.
But, it's had the unintended consequence of messing with people's lives in the western part.
Imagine for a moment if the United States
just declared that the time in Washington DC was now the time across the entire US.
This is a pretty similar case and the people in the western parts of China are about 2 hours behind
Beijing in real terms. This messes with workers' productivity in the area and it means that if you have a normal 9:00 to 5:00 job,
you can either effectively go into work at 7:00 a.m and leave at 3:00 p.m,
or you can adjust your schedule, going to work at 11 a.m and work until 7 p.m. A few years ago,
Apple randomly switched users' time zones in this area to the unofficial time zones
they were using to get by and caused many people to accidentally sleep in for 2 extra hours. And as a final weird
consequence of this policy, you can walk across this very tiny border from China into
Afghanistan and have to set your clock back a full three and a half
hours after crossing, which is a bigger time difference than traveling all the way from Boston to Los Angeles,
you can achieve by just walking a few minutes.
Next up, is how weird the International Dateline looks in the Pacific. Again in theory,
the International Dateline would be a straight line with a 24 hour time difference on either side of it. While the Pacific here is
mostly empty, there are a few islands and land chunks that curve the line pretty dramatically in some places.
Like here in Samoa, where the government decided to completely skip December 30th,
2011 and move the country forward an entire day. Besides them not liking LeBron and wanting to skip his birthday, the other
reason they decided to do that was because way back in
1892, the Samoan king moved the country east of the Dateline in order to be closer
connected to the US, but over a 100 years since then, Samoa's economy grew closer to Australia and New Zealand
instead, despite being 21 hours ahead in time from Sydney. So in 2011, they changed it back to how things were before
1892. But this created another awkward
situation in neighboring American Samoa, just 70 kilometers away which stuck with being east of the Dateline, which makes a
24 hour time difference between them and a 25 hour time difference in the summer.
But even weirder is this monstrosity in Kiribas, where the date line lunges out
2,000 miles to surround it, before coming back to
relatively normal. This
situation means that you could start in Hawaii on a Monday, travel south, and end up in Tuesday
and if you kept going south, you'd end up back in Monday.
This also means that at some point
every day, there exist 3 days going on at the same time in different parts of the world. When it's 6:30 a.m
in New York on Saturday, its 11:30 p.m in American Samoa on Friday, and it's 12:30 a.m
in Christmas Island, Kiribas on Sunday.
But perhaps the weirdest timezone change you can ever experience is right here in the United States. The US
is mostly pretty straightforward with 4 time zones that cover the continental 48 states and one each for Hawaii and Alaska.
But daylight savings time is where things get complicated. Two states don't follow daylight savings time.
Hawaii, which doesn't matter because it's surrounded by ocean and Arizona which is weird because it's surrounded by land. But Arizona gets even more weird,
when you consider the borders of the Navajo reservation, which does follow daylight savings time.
This is even further complicated by the Hopi reservation
which is totally surrounded by the Navajo reservation and like the rest of Arizona, decides to not follow daylight savings time.
But the Navajo Reservation has an enclave inside of the Hopi reservation
which creates a time zone map of Arizona during daylight savings time that looks like this. In
theory, you could drive in a straight line and hit all of these spots and have to change your clock an hour back and forth
7 times all while driving,
inside of the same state. And while road trips like this one can be a lot of fun,
you may want to test out driving in a game first, like The Crew 2, which is entirely open-world meaning they recreated the entire
US and you can drive and race through all of it. Not only in cars, but also boats, motorcycles and planes. As
somebody who's really passionate about both video games and driving,
I really enjoyed playing this and if you're into car games or racing games,
I'm sure you will too.
If you think you're interested in playing this, there's a link in the description where you can check it out next.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next week for another new video then.