So I boarded the airplane that was to take me from Hawaii to Beijing well entertained. We took off shortly after midnight and I thus had my first brief glimpse of the fourth of September flying over the Hawaiian Islands, but since the State of Hawaii is located on the western boundary to the next time zone, the plane’s on-board time was reset to one hour before midnight only minutes after we left Oahu. However, during the following last hour of the third of September the board clock reached midnight again and the fourth of September broke for the second time. Then, just forty-two minutes later, we reached the International Date Line, which is not a time zone boundary but an imaginary dividing line running mostly straight from north to south through the middle of the world’s most westerly and easternmost time zone, which, among other designations, bears the beautiful name “Anywhere on Earth”. So this time it was not the clock that was put forward but the calendar, and it was still seventeen minutes to one in the morning, but within one second the date had changed and we were flying into the early hours of the fifth of September.