Adding it up in Addis Ababa

There are certain assumptions you make when you travel. When you’re about to land in a new time zone, and the pilot says, “It’s 2:36am local time”, you adjust your watch and you assume it’s 2:36am. When you’re first learning your way around a new city, you pull out your trusty little map and you assume that the streets on it are so named because, well, those are their names. And let’s face it, unless you’re a character on a soap opera who’s been in a coma due to a tragic run-in with a shovel, you assume that if it’s 2007 where you come from, it’s 2007 everywhere. But alas, Young Jedi, savvy as you are, if you assumed any of that in Ethiopia, you would be in a bit of a mess.

It all started when Teddy, the owner of our hotel, left me a message: “Call Tenagne at his office. Today. 3 o’clock, not Ethiopian time.” And it was dated March 8, 1999. Now, I’ve been around enough to know that life has an original face in each country and unpredictable rhythms are to be loved and expected. But I could have sworn there was some kind of international consensus on the year and the time of day. So, for a second, I thought maybe Teddy and I needed to have a little chat. I went up to him and said, “Um, Teddy, 1999?” He said, “Oh, sorry, I guess it’s 2007 for you.” For me? Ok. I gave him a half nod and a half smile, splitting the difference because I really didn’t know where to go from there. The problem is, Teddy reminds me of my friend Louis. You can’t always tell when he’s joking or taking the piss out of you, or better yet, asking you a question that makes you think, “He can’t be serious…”, and of course, this is precisely when he’s being serious. So, I dropped 1999 and moved on…

“What time should I call him?” Unmistakably straight-faced this time, Teddy said, “3 o’clock, but NOT Ethiopian time.” I asked, “Then, do you mean I should call him at 3 o’clock MY time?”, and he answered, “Yes, your time.” Again, I gave him the half nod, but no smile. I just walked away in a trance, staring at this paper and muttering under my breath, “MY time…? What time is that?? I’m from Canada, but I’ve just spent 7 months in Europe, a month in Asia, 3 weeks in Egypt, and now I live here…”

Well. Enough with the shenanigans. This is the story. Ethiopia is technically three hours ahead of GMT, which means when it’s 8am in Toronto, it’s 3pm in Ethiopia… or so the rest of the world thinks. But what the smart people who figured out this time zone thing didn’t know was that Ethiopia had long ago decided to screw it and come up with their own system. They’d rather tell time by the sun and it’s all because they’re so close to the equator. Their days are almost exactly 12 hours long all year round, so when the sun comes up at approximately 6am our time (and by our time, I mean the time we think it is in Ethiopia), they begin a new day and count it as 12 o’clock. So, 7am is actually 1 o’clock, 8am is 2 o’clock and away we go until the sun goes down 12 hours later at 6pm “our time” when it’s actually 12 o’clock again. Most people living in Addis Ababa know both times, but they don’t know which clock YOU are going by, so there’s always a discussion, “Ethiopian time or not Ethiopian time…?” And because Ethiopians are obsessive about punctuality and consider being late a sign of disrespect, you absolutely don’t want to get it wrong.

Now, for the year. You have to love history to appreciate this. Julius Caesar developed a calendar in 46 B.C. and called it… drum roll, the Julian Calendar. All was well and it was widely used until Pope Gregory XIII came along in 1582, decided to make up his own calendar and called it… yep, the Gregorian calendar. It was not long after that most of the world adopted the Pope’s way of calculating time, and certainly all the countries in the West did. But Ethiopia decided to be creative and come up with their own “Ethiopic” calendar. It has much to do with their Orthodox Christian heritage, but suffice to say that it’s very similar to what Julius Caesar had in mind, with a few twists. It works like this: there are 13 months in the year, 12 months comprising 30 days each and a final one made of up only 5 or 6 days depending on whether it’s a leap year. And since they believe that God created the world 5500 years before Jesus was born, there’s some math, unbeknownst to me, that makes it 1999 in Ethiopia. They’re actually ringing in the Millennium this coming September 11. Monster million-dollar events, hundreds of thousands of people descending on the capital, and as Teddy beamed at me yesterday: “70,000 Jamaicans are coming!”

As if this weren’t enough to flip life on its head, the streets in Addis Ababa got a name make-over in 2005. The Chinese came to Ethiopia and built a Ring Road that goes around the city. Before they left, they donated a whole bunch of shiny new street signs. This is great for foreigners because the signs are in English and you can find one on almost every corner (not a luxury you have in many places). The city decided to re-name all the streets, an excellent idea in principle, because they used to be poorly organized and included too many colonial references. Many of them are now named after African nations and properly marked. But, you see, there’s a problem and it’s two-fold. First, no one knows the new names because they all think the old ones work just fine… So, if you want to get to “Democratic Republic of Congo Street”, you can ask around all you like but nobody knows what you’re talking about. Instead, everyone calls it “Olympia”, which, you might agree, is in a slightly different family and can make a conversation with a taxi driver feel like an interview on The Daily Show. And to make things even funnier (or frustrating, depending on the day), as the Chinese were rolling out of town and the first signs were going up, someone noticed, oops, they’re almost all misspelled…

So, as a new kid on the block, you go around the city asking for a street that doesn’t exist at 10 o’clock when it’s really 4 o’clock in a year only you are in…

Welcome to Ethiopia.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.