When you’re traveling internationally, sometimes you’ll fly into a different time zone. For example, if you go from the UK to Belgium or the Netherlands, then you would have to move your watch one hour forward. However, if you’re flying to the States, the time difference can be up to 8 hours! Due to the size of some countries, they have to use multiple time zones as they’re just too big to use one. However, France is relatively small but has the most time zones in the world! Keep on reading to discover how it happened!
Don’t let France’s size fool you!
Even though France is not that big of a country, it has the most timezones worldwide. The country itself has just one zone. However, the French people used to conquer the world and capture multiple territories worldwide. It has nations in Europe, South America, the Indian Ocean, The Pacific, and other regions.
This results in more than 12 timezones or 13 when daylight saving time is considered in some areas! With these other regions being French territory, France also holds some of the longest domestic flights on the planet. For example, if you want to go from Paris to Tahiti, it will be a 10.000-mile journey!
When you compare France to the USA, a country that is 18 times bigger geographically, it is quite impressive that the French have more time zones than the USA. In the United States of America, they only use 11 different time zones!
China is the biggest country with just a single time zone!
In contrast to the states or other bigger countries that use multiple time zones within their country, China chooses to have one time zone for the whole country! This might sound super efficient. However, it is quite difficult for neighboring countries or people who have to cross the border often. It also creates the biggest timezone difference. This happens on the border between Afghanistan and China, where if you were to cross the border from Afghanistan to China, you’d jump forward more than 3 hours! This is because Afghanistan uses UTC +4:30, while China uses the timezone that aligns more with Beijing which is UTC +8:00!
