Daylight Saving Time in Egypt

It has been four days now since Egypt re-set its clocks-advanced it by one hour, to be precise. But the battle to adjust to the changed time still continues-the body clock continues to “live in the past”. Mornings are disrupted- at “dawn”, it is still dark outside. My friends with children have been complaining that making it to the school on time these days is a herculean task.

Egypt practices daylight saving time between the last Thursday of April andthe last Thursday in September. This year the change was made at midnight (local time) on 24th April (Thursday)-one second after 23:59:59 became 1:00:00 on Friday. We arenow at three hours ahead of GMT.
Read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_around_the_world..

The rationale behind this practice is to make available longer daylight hours in the evenings for activities after the normal working hours. Also the electricity consumption decreases since it is daylight for much of the waking hours. Hence the term "daylight saving time"-you save the daylight for the waking hours!

However, there is still much debate on the merits of practicing daylight saving time. Inconvenience, disruptions in schedule etc are some of the points against this practice. India too used to practice daylight saving time for a few years but the practice has now been discontinued.

For us Indians in Egypt, for six months we will be closer to the Indian Standard Time-we are now only 2.5 hours behind India! And in my six months in Cairo, I had to wait for the daylight saving time to start to enjoy a cup of tea at sunset on a working day with my husbandJ