aysabaw.com

My boss asked me to book a flight from Dubai to Morocco for a business trip. I immediately got flight schedules online and showed it to him. While going through the details of the flight, he looked at the flight duration. From Dubai to Morocco, it takes 8 hours and 20 minutes while coming back takes only 7 hours and 20 minutes. He asked me if I know why the difference when the distance is just the same. So my mind started running faster than a leopard thinking what the answer to his question is. I was thinking maybe it was because of the time zone. But like a student scared to recite because of the uncertainty on the answer, I just smiled and said I don’t know. He raised his eye brows which made him look like a disappointed teacher of a high school student who can’t tell the answer to the equation: 1 + 1.

He asked again for the 2nd time, and my answer is still the same. I really don’t know.
He started the explanation to his unfathomable question. He said that From Dubai to Morocco, the flight duration is longer because the plane is flying at the direction where the Earth’s rotation is heading to. It’s like the plane is chasing the Earth. So my head started seeing images of plane running along with the earth. While going back to Dubai from Morocco, the plane is flying opposite the Earth’s rotation so this route is faster. Sorry, but I can’t explain the rotation thing along with the axis and time zone terminologies etc.

I smiled and I told him that, I never really bothered about these things. Well, it’s just that – how do I know which way is the Earth rotating? I know yeah that it rotates but where to, I have no clue. He said that it’s not about bothering but this is general knowledge. So the next question that he asked me is – Is the Sun rotating around the Earth or vice versa. This I know for sure. So like a brave little kid in school who raises her arm so high so that the teacher will call her to answer the question – I answered, the Earth revolves around the Sun. And at the back of my mind, I felt like I won a million dollar question in a game show like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He said that during the early times of the Greeks and Egyptians, they believed that the Sun rotates around the Earth and that the Earth is like a disc and if you reach the end you will fall from it just like falling from a cliff. And then my imagination again sparked seeing some imaginary pharaohs walking and a Sun rotating around a disc Earth and a pharaoh walks to the edge and falls to the universe. The he cut out my imagination by asking again, is the Earth rotating around the moon or vice versa? And so this time I answered the 2 million dollar question correctly. He said, well this is general knowledge on Geography and Astrology that we learn from school. Then my thoughts went back to my Elementary and High School times, duh. I can’t remember anything, I’m an idiot. Yeah, it’s just general knowledge. I wanted to defend myself and my school that, well yeah it was thought to us by our teachers but I forgot about it already. (LOL) After that conversation I felt like buying a basic Geography and Astrology book, but I thought it’s easier to learn when someone just tells you the information so you don’t need to go through the whole book (shame on me for writing this statement, haha what a lazy girl I am.)

Well, new learning. Ummm, not really new – let’s say a review on general knowledge 🙂