Through Time and Space

December 22nd 2016

Flashback

01:20, Seoul, in an apartment somewhere in Hongdae

I'm lying in bed, the light has been off for a while. Jan is still up watching videos, I'm just about to fall asleep. I'd like to, at least.
"Okay so you have to explain the thing with the YouTube-paradox to me again."
I sit upright in bed with a silent sigh — this can take a while. Okay, so, the YouTube-paradox...
"If a video is released in Germany at 10 am every day, will I see two videos in one day when we fly to LA in the morning of the 22th of December and arrive two hours earlier on the same day? Or will I see no video at all for a day?" (And why can't we travel back in time like that?)

I can proudly say that I understood it by now.

I'll spare you the half-hour midnight debate and skip right to the conclusion: The ominous date line doesn't really care about YouTube — and vice versa. There will still be one video every 24 hours.
For those of you who are as confused by the date line as we are, I'll try a little analogy here:
Imagine there is a traveller travelling around the world with a pocket watch — with the speed of light, for simplicity. Assume the traveller stops once in every timezone — starting in Frankfurt at 12:00 and moving east from there. At each stop, our traveller will adjust the watch to the local time — one hour forward every time. When the traveller arrives back in Frankfurt from the west, the watch will have been adjusted 24 times, causing it to be a day fast when we arrive back where we started.
To avoid this, we introduce the international date line — an arbitrarily chosen line that introduces an additional time shift by 24 hours in the opposite direction. The time on either side of the line is identical, only the date changes.

Of course, you'll have to account for time moving a few nanoseconds slower in an airplane compared to the ground...

Understood now? Don't worry if not, it's really confusing.


4 Hours to LA, Flight VA 1

Meanwhile we have crossed the date line, unfortunately not noticing anything about it — the expected time-travel light and sound effects remained absent. I have lost track over how long we are on the go by now and how many movies I have watched already (Train to Busan 7.5/10, An 7/10, In Bruges 5/10, ...). Sleeping doesn't really work, so I'm writing some stuff for the Blog. Jan is re-watching Harry Potter and Little Lord Fauntleroy for the 100th time. Just before midnight New Zealand time the crew is passing out chocolate Santas.
The upside of watching movies you've seen before: You already know what happens and can't be disappointed — and those movies just make me feel good! I made it through 5 movies and a three-hour podcast — pretty good if you ask me.

New Zealand — Review

A review in one sentence: New Zealand delivers on its promises. In our three weeks here, we saw beautiful scenery everywhere, visited gorgeous beaches, and hiked through alien landscapes. The New Zealanders we met were incredibly kind and accommodating — which Jan also notices while driving.

After the two months of our journey that we mostly spent in and around cities, we really experience an entirely different way of travelling here. Outside of Auckland, New Zealand is very sparsely populated, which is why we feel a bit lost sometimes (e.g. in Greymouth). It's hard to imagine a life here for us because of that — finding enough variety in your everyday life seems difficult in a town of a few hundred.

Especially in the small towns we pass through, I miss some more vibrant inner cities with, like, more than four different restaurants.

Culturally speaking, New Zealand is not that different to Great Britain — Only the bilingualism with Māori becomes apparent at times — most cities, for example, have Māori names (Rotorua, Taupo, ...). What we can't understand is why people come to New Zealand to "work and travel": You could probably earn your money back home without having to harvest kiwis all day and travel New Zealand at your own pace afterwards. It's also not useful for learning English — everyone here speaks German anyway.
Still: It's a wonderful country with loads of interesting things and I can recommend everyone to visit New Zealand and travel the land!

And, of course, two things you shouldn't do in New Zealand: As far as possible, you should definitely not lose your way — getting lost in the wilderness here is, lacking phone reception and other human beings within a radius of 100-ish km, really something you'd rather avoid. Also, you shouldn't assume that New Zealand is all that warm in summer — the weather on the south island is rather chilly and even in the north, it's barely warm enough to swim.

There will be pictures again in the next post when we are done catching up on some much needed rest after 35 hours without sleep.