Logical Ethiopia

In the morning I glanced at my Ethiopian colleague Shumet's wristwatch and it read 2:45, reminding me that time in Ethiopia is counted from 6am being zero, and 7am being 1 o' clock. Shumet explained that the sun rises at 6am so this is the start of the day, and the sun sets around 6pm, of course 12 hours later, so this was the beginning of the night. Also, the Ethiopian calendar has 12 months that are 30 days long and a 13th month that is 5 days long. That 13th month marks the time that Ethiopians begin to think about the new year. Ethiopian new year is in September, around the 11th or 12th, which is just before the spring season in this part of the world, and of course spring is when life comes back and the flowers bloom. All this was so extremely logical compared with the system used in the West where 12 midnight is placed in between the setting and rising of the sun, and the new year takes place in the dead of winter (in America, most of Europe) or the middle of summer (Australia, New Zealand, etc). The only seeming inconsistency with the Ethiopian calendar is that they consider the Gregorian\American calendar year of 2008 to be 2001, meaning that their calendar is 7 years behind ours. The reason, I was told, for this is that in Biblical times it took a long time for people to travel from the Middle East to Ethiopia and tell them of the birth of Jesus. In fact, this took 7 years time. So they marked their calendar, not from the time when Jesus was said to have been born, but from when they heard the news, which was 7 years later.