Friday, July 22, 2016

Why everyone in Ethiopia is seven years younger (Conde Nast Traveller)

Upon landing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Emma Southey joined the queue to get her tourist visa stamped. Southey remembers the process being very efficient and, within no time, she was officially in the country. However, when Southey, a travel consultant at Outposts Travel Africa, looked at the date on the receipt, it read 26 July 2008. She thought to herself: “Am I going crazy? I’m sure when I left the UK it was 2015!”
Neither did Southey travel back in time nor was the date on the visa receipt inaccurate. It was because Ethiopia follows a calendar that is years behind the Gregorian calendar that most of the world follows. “Ethiopia is really the only country with a Christian calendar whose count is 7 to 8 years different than the Gregorian calendar,” says Dr Jonathan Ben-Dov, researcher of calendars in antiquity at Department of Biblical Studies in University of Haifa. 
(Read rest of the article on CNT's website!)

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