Women/Time

Today on my morning walk around Rome I noticed an abundance of yellow flowers. Usually there are flower men walking around all the tourist areas, pretending to give away roses and then charging you when you accept them, but today I noticed just these small yellow flowers wrapped in pretty paper--and people were actually buying them, tourists and locals alike.

And then I remembered, today is International Women's Day. In Italia, it is an official holiday and celebrated like St. Valentine's Day plus Mother's Day, with the men showing love to the women around them. It also serves as a women's awareness day, so there are posters up about women's rights and things. The UN also sponsors International Women's Day, but it's not celebrated in the US.

What the US does have today is Daylight Savings Time...something Italy won't have until the last Sunday in March. So for a little while I am only six hours ahead of you. Dad e-mailed me last night and told me about DST and for a bit I was worried that I had missed it here, that I was an hour behind. A quick check on the world clock told me otherwise, though, and I looked up on the internet just when DST would start here. It's weird to me that some countries don't even observe it and the actual days differ among the ones that do.

In ancient Roman times, the day was divided into 12 equal parts, except those parts were longer or shorter depending on the time of the year--there was no standardized time. They didn't need standardized time then, though. The day started at sunrise, there was a meal at midday (the sixth "part"), then a resting time until the last three hours, when they went back to work.

I know. That sounds a lot like what they do today: disregard the standardization of time and instead let their biological clocks/the sun decide what "time" it actually is. Like I've been saying all along, these people are living in the past, in the good old days of the Roman Empire. (I'm getting used to it though...my clock is telling me it's about time for a nap.)