International travel vs. the internal clock.

It revolves around datelines, time zones, stuff like that. At the moment, we are cruising the Baltic Sea heading for Helsinki. It’s nine hours difference than back home. But it may as well be ninety. I know this because I look at the clock every other second and still don’t know what time it is.  I know this because every time I want to call back home to check on the cats or Norman wants to call his mother, we have no idea what time is there, here, anywhere. The day after tomorrow, we head for Russia where there is a ten hour difference. Good luck to us. International travel may be educational and broadening, but it is also stupifying. I sleep all the time. Or want to. I can’t get with it. Norman can get with it a little better than me, but today he locked the safe in our room with another set of numbers than he meant to punch in. We had to call the purser to come and unlock the ruddy thing. The purser, younger than us by a few decades, said that when he goes home to Europe (we’re not in Europe?), it gets harder every year to adjust to the time zones. He showed me the long list of other travelers locked out of their safes aboard ship. It’s an epidemic. In the old days, travel was much slower. Sometimes it could take months to get to a place. That was hard in some ways, but not on the internal clock. When Charles Lindbergh flew around the world, he was a young man. But I’ll bet his internal clock didn’t know what time it was. I’ll bet you anything he got locked out of his safe just like the rest of us. Explorers never mention that kind of stuff, though. Bad for the image.