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Sunday, February 17, 2008

Times and Seasons



When I moved to Argentina, there was a four hour difference between Rosario time and Arizona time. And as neither participated in daylight savings time, that never changed. However, when Mario called to wish his family Happy New Year, they all seemed to have gone to bed unusually early and we discovered that the new government of Cristina Kirchner decided to start daylight savings time. So all the clocks moved ahead one hour with the intention of giving people more sunlight to accomplish their tasks, thus less need to use the lights, which would supposedly result in saving energy.

It is now gets light around 8am and stays light until 9:30 at night. However, Argentines apparently don't allow the clock to rule them, but rather move in accordance with the solar rhythms. Thus people are still not eating until after the sun goes down, which means not until 10. All the beach towns are furious because that means that instead of having one seating of the vacationing masses about 8:30 and another seating of diners aroung 10, now everyone comes at 10, they can serve far less people, and their profits have been cut in half.

One province tried the change for a week, and decided they didn't like it, and changed their clocks back. So all of Argentina is in one time zone, except for a random province in the middle which is in it's own time zone.

Argentina's daylight savings experiment will end sometime in March, when all clocks will return to their previous time. I am glad only because a 5 hour difference with my family and a 6 hour difference with California makes it even more annoyingly hard to place phone calls.

3 comments:

Tammy said...

I am glad that the daylight savings experiment failed there because I agree, 6 hours is way too hard to organize around phone calls! Especially now that you are an American Freelancer!! :)

Ashley said...

Is this why we've been playing phone tag? So crazy...Christina should really worry more about those terrible eye lashes before she worries about something as menial as energy savings.

Misty Smart said...

Adrianne- This post means nothing to me, because I just call you whenever I feel like ot, or my house is quiet. I am probably the rudest relative you have!! Don't think I just do it to punish you because youlive so far...I did it to you in Washington, DC too. PS can Cade come for the summer???