Cultural: What time zone is Poland in?
Here's a map showing how the time zones in the world are divided up.
If you look carefully at what you think of as Europe, you will see that most of the main part of Europe is all one time zone - It is called Central European Time zone and it is UTC+1 (Coordinated Universal Time)
I put pink "x" where Poland is.
Here's a bigger, better map showing the European time zones. Couresy of timetemperature.com
I did a quick calculation using a flyer mileage chart. It is about 1400 miles from Warsaw to Spain We are all in the same time zone!
This time zone map of North America/Central America is courtesy of Wikipedia. Thanks Wikipedia!
It is about 1600 miles from Atlanta, GA to Salt Lake City, Utah. Imagine if all of that area in the US were one time zone. Just pretend for a minute that Salt Lake City were in the eastern time zone. How different the days would look from those who live in Atlanta! At 8 am, it would probably still be dark or barely light and be light much later than it is in Atlanta at 5 pm, for example.
We recently changed time zones here in Europe - in fact, just over a week ago - Oct 29 this year, in fact.
For us here in Poland, it is now dark by 5 pm and getting darkish at 4 something. This the hardest part of the year for me as I really dislike the early dark. At its worst, it will be dark at 3:30 pm - right around Dec. 21. Then it will begin to get lighter. By Feb. it will be light until 5 pm again, and I will begin to feel better.
I don't suffer from depression because of the dark - I simply don't care for it. I've learned to "deal with it", however, and to have plenty of light on in my sewing room and main parts of the house if necessary. It did used to bother me until I learned to turn on more lights and get brighter light bulbs!
The people in Spain and farther west have darkness in the morning. I think this lends to their late rising and late going to bed. (These are my observations from when I visited Spain a few years ago anyway - I am sure it is not a universal truth.)
As it is, we are 6 hours ahead of EST in the USA most of the year. We are one hour ahead of the UK and 9 hours ahead of California.
As to the readers here from Australia or other parts of the world - here's the map of Australia. The numbers are UTC + whatever number you see.
You can see that the time in Perth (far west coast) isn't the same as in Sydney (far east east) or Melbourne. The sun would be in very different places at 8 am if it were all the same time.
Poland is at the far east of the eastern European time zone (western European time zone involves mostly the UK and Portugal and part of some of the islands off the coast of Portugal).
In truth, we should be with the Ukraine and Lithuania, who are one hour ahead of us. But we aren't. They drew the line like some states draw their congressional district lines - they wanted Poland included with the main part of Europe and not on a different zone.
This isn't necessarily a very important cultural post - just an informative one. We are on the same time zone as Amsterdam, Paris, and Madrid. It makes it great for flying and business - but it is kind of strange to me. I'm used to changing time zones somewhat frequently when traveling in the USA.
And that's all from my part of the world today!
Have a great day!
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