From May 13th to June 7th, 2019, my wife and I took a cruise from Kobe, Japan to Vancouver via Japanese ports, next Hokkaido, followed by Kamchatka, Russian Federation, the five days and nights across the Bering Sea, along the Aleutian Islands on the their north sides, to and down the coast of Alaska and three of its towns, to Prince Rupert and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The voyage has given us a new and different understanding of “time.”
One aspect of our new appreciation was, during this voyage from west to east across the Sea of Japan and the northern Pacific and the Bering Sea, was the constant, daily loss of one hour. Each day, with only two exceptions, we crossed into a new time zone, requiring us to "spring forward" an hour, such that each day we were experiencing had only 23 hours.
That had a deleterious effect on our inner, biological clock. But the greatest confusion and realization came when we crossed the International Dateline (the “IDL”) on May 25th.
The IDL is an artificial line on maps of the Earth’s surface that creates and defines the boundary between one day and the next. Technically, it is one half of the way around the globe from the Prime Meridian (0 degrees longitude) at Greenwich, London, United Kingdom, which is the reference point for all time zones. The IDL is not straight, zigzagging to avoid political borders and avoid slicing through some countries. See www.timeanddate.com’s “Time Zone Map.”
When one crosses the IDL from east to west, a day is added; and when crossed from west to east, you subtract a day. If one takes into account the likely crossing also into a different time zone, one must add or subtract an hour also.
When we crossed the International Dateline in our crossing of the Bering Sea, while we lived through a May 25th “yesterday,” we then found ourselves living through a “second” May 25th on the next day. To illustrate the weirdness of this, I went online on the second May 25th and found myself reading the New York Times edition of May 26th!
