Where tomorrow becomes yesterday

When people on the South Sea island of Samoa celebrate the New Year, the year is already 24 hours old on Tonga, a few islands further west.
The two islands are separated by 900 km. They have the same time, but different dates. This means that on Tonga on Friday it is still yesterday, Thursday, on Samoa.
Samoans, on the other hand, can on Friday phone their friends on Tonga tomorrow, Saturday, because it is always a day later there. Confused?
Well, it works like that: The worldwide standard time is calculated from the Greenwich meridian near London. Toward the west, time is behind, toward the east, ahead.
At 11 a.m. on New Year's Eve in London, if one moves east, it is noon in Berlin, 7 p.m. in Singapore, and midnight on Tonga.
Moving west, it is only 10 a.m. on the Azores, 6 a.m. in New York and 3 a.m. on the US west coast. On Samoa the day just starts: it is 00:00. The International Date Line separates Tonga and Samoa.
"You can easily celebrate your birthday twice," said German national Ronald Kubik, who lived on Tonga for years and is now a Samoa resident.
But of course, those not in the mood for a party, can take advantage of the situation, too. If someone packs their bags really early on Samoa and gets on the 1-hour flight to Tonga he arrives when the dreaded date has passed.
The issue of the lost day greatly scared the crew of the world's first man to circumnavigate the globe, Ferdinand Magellan, who had departed from Seville, Spain, westward in 1519.
The survivors of the expedition had kept detailed logs and feared for their eternal salvation when they discovered upon their return in 1522 that they had lost a whole day.
Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, on the other hand, was highly upbeat when realized he had not lost his race in "Around the World in Eighty Days," but gained one day by starting out toward the east.
Anyone vacationing near the Date Line has to be doubly careful, for example when booking flights and hotels. Holidaymakers flying on Dec. 30 from Tonga to Samoa need to book a room at their Samoa hotel for the 29th. And those flying in the other direction must book their room on Tonga for Dec. 31. Locals are well used to the issues arising from the date difference. "There is sometimes confusion when we phone relatives in New Zealand," said Samoa's Deputy Prime Minister Misa Telefoni. In order to get their New Year wishes to New Zealand on time, Samoans have to pick up the phone on the morning of Dec. 31.
The dividing line between today, tomorrow and yesterday is more or less the 180th line of longitude. Up north, it bulges toward the east to prevent a part of Siberia lagging behind the rest of Russia, and a bit further south it moves westward to make sure that the US Aleutian islands near Alaska are not one day ahead of the mother country.
And then there is Kiribati. Until 1995 the Date Line went smack through the middle of the Pacific kingdom, whose islands are spread out over 5,000 km in an east-west arc. The government decided then to align themselves fully to the west.
Therefore the island of Kiritimati may be east of the Date Line, time-wise it belongs to the Western Hemisphere and is 14 hours ahead of Greenwich, Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version.