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Friday has been canceled in Samoa. The South Pacific nation is switching to a different time zone, which will put them on the other side of the International Date Line.
People in Samoa (population 193,000) want to be closer time-wise to Australia, New Zealand, China and Tonga because they do so much more day-to-day business with those relatively nearby nations than with the rest of the world. And the problem until now, for example, has been that when it’s 8 a.m. Monday in Samoa it’s 8 a.m. Tuesday in Tonga. Business people in Samoa have kind of been losing a working day when it comes to dealing with their nearest neighbors.
Now the time, literally, has come. When 11:59:59 p.m. strikes Thursday in Samoa, the next tick will take folks there to Saturday.
And no one will be born or die on Dec. 30, 2011, in Samoa. Weird.
If this had happened in any part of the U.S., you can bet we’d skip Monday before messing with a Friday. Link -via reddit
(Image credit: Wikipedia user Plenz)
This past week, drivers in Samoa had to switch from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the wrong, er, left side. Since the switch was relatively sudden, all the buses now open onto the middle of the street! The Samoans say the switch was to end their dependence on American-made vehicles. Mental_floss takes a look at how other nations decided which side of the road to drive on. Some reasons seems silly in retrospect. Link
Yesterday, the residents of Samoa began driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. This is the first major switch since the 1970s, when Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone made the change. Randy James of Time magazine has an article exploring how different nations came to use different sides of the road:
Theories differ, but there’s no doubt Napoleon was a major influence. The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there’s evidence of a Parisian “keep-right” law dating to 1794). Some say that before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Hitler, in turn, ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s. Nations that escaped right-handed conquest, like Great Britain, preserved their left-handed tradition.
Image by flickr user multitrack used under creative commons license.
