Apparently Daylight Savings Time Has Started

So apparently yesterday (Sunday) daylight savings time started in Russia, a fact that Jeff and I learned this morning (Monday) when a co-worker called telling Jeff that the van to work was waiting for him. We were still asleep and were very much confused. After taking a few moments to clear our heads we realized that it must have been daylight savings yesterday, as we thought it was 7:10 a.m., but the co-worker on the phone said it was 8:10 a.m.

That got me to thinking, how do you know its daylight savings? Maybe some people out there pay close attention to the dates, but for Jeff and I daylight savings always just sort of rolls around without either of us really knowing about it more than a day or two in advance. When you are in the States you normally hear about it on the news or someone who heard it on the news reminds you (we were in Russia when daylight savings started a few weeks ago back home, but because we read US news, we knew that clocks were changing). Even if for some reason you failed to hear about daylight savings before you wake up Sunday morning, there are usually a myriad of things that will clue you in to the new time, such as an automated clock (cell phone, computer, cable box, etc.) displaying a different time than your watch, tuning into your favorite TV show only to see it is not currently on, or even showing up at an event at the wrong time. In any case, we are willing to bet that by the end of the day Sunday most people have managed to figure out the new time (after all, neither of us can remember a time where we didn’t figure it out in our 50 combined years of life on this planet).

With all of that said, how in the heck did we fail to figure out that the time changed? Well, for starters . . . how are we supposed to know which countries observe daylight savings time? Honestly, I couldn’t list the countries that do and do not spring forward and fall back each year (even though ironically Jeff and I saw a map with that exact information earlier this week – but we were just looking at it to see what time it was in Brazil, not to see if daylight savings was coming)! But besides that, all of the normal things that would clue us in back home are absent here. Jeff didn’t work on Sunday, and we spent the day relaxing in the hotel for the most part. When we went to eat, we were well within the hours that the restaurant was open, so there was nothing to clue us in there. We don’t have a cell phone that is synched up with Russian time, and both of our computers are set to Central Time. We don’t speak Russian or follow Russian news, and we don’t get any English news stations that might have tipped us off to the change. We watched American TV through our Slingbox, but because the time didn’t change in the US, all of our sporting events and shows were on at their regularly scheduled time. Finally, there is only one clock in this entire hotel, and it is in the lobby above the elevators. Since we didn’t take the elevators from the lobby, we didn’t see the new time (not that we would have been looking since we had no reason to suspect we were off by an hour).

I guess we have learned our lesson for future travels!