Wednesday, 9 January 2008

Time travel

To visit my friends at Christmas, I used Ethiopian Airways (“Connecting Africa to the rest of the World”) rather than Kenyan (“Pride of Africa”) and so spent a night in Addis Ababa each way. The useful tit-bit for pub quizzes is that Ethiopia is the only country still using the Julian Calendar, so this year is 2000 and started on Sept 12th in our Gregorian calendars. Thus I travelled 7 years back and forward again each way. All that Tardis stuff bothered me much less than the half hour early they tried to get me on the hotel-airport bus coming back at Addis.

I also had Christmas twice; my return trip happened to be on the Ethiopian Christmas day (7th Jan this year, though all the books/calendars say it is the 8th).

You can see why they had famine there when you look at the scenery but Addis seems nice enough.

Another quiz question: Anyone know which was the last country to switch from the Julian calendar?

1 comment:

Margaret said...

Maybe Greece, according to my extensive research in Wiki!