Chile has its own time zone (CLT) and version of daylight savings time.
When we arrived, our time was the same as Eastern Standard Time (EST), where cities like Raleigh, New York City, Atlanta, and Miami are located.
This was convenient for our remote work and schooling, both of which aligned to EST time.
Now, it’s spring, and we’ve sprung forward an hour in CLT. It’s 6am in New York, and it’s 7am here.
In early November, when the U.S. falls back an hour in daylight savings time, we’ll have a two hour head start on EST. 6am in New York will be 8am here.
Most of my professional work in the US spans North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. It was a surprise to someone I had a call with yesterday in the US to find out that there is a timezone east of EST that is still in the western hemisphere of the world, observing there’s nothing but the Atlantic Ocean and a smattering of exotic islands between the US and Europe.
But there are hundreds of millions of people in South America waking up and heading to work in time zones where the day starts earlier than in EST. In Chile, millions of these people, waking up before those on the US Atlantic Coast, are on the west coast of South America on the Pacific Ocean.
It still takes time to wrap my head around the fact that, here in the Chilean Andes, we’re east of both the Pacific Ocean and our beach house on the Atlantic Ocean.
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