After a while here, you get used to ‘Thai Time’, which is really just another way of saying ‘always being late’. Granted, the unpredictable traffic throws a particularly nasty kink into things, but I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve thought I’d have the whole movie theater to myself, only to have 75% of the audience pile in 15 minutes after the movie starts (and don’t even get me started on the glacial pace that Thais amble around the city). That’s just the way things work, and you get used to it. But when I was walking down Sukhumvit 22 the other day, I noticed a peculiar sign on the window of a shop that seemed to give me an extra hour every day.

It’s not that big of a deal actually, but it did give me a chuckle and I wondered at what time the clock stopped counting up. Could you one day hear someone say “I’ll see you at 38 o’clock?”

I'm going to go ahead and assume they mean the place is open from 11:30am to 1am, although you never know in Thailand. Maybe they have a wormhole inside.

I’m going to go ahead and assume they mean the place is open from 11:30am to 1am, although you never know in Thailand. Maybe they have a wormhole inside.

Granted, when you understand how time works in Thailand, you can see how this might happen. I won’t get into details (because there are quite a few other sites that have already done it), but the traditional Thai way of telling time is to divide a day into 4 6-hour chunks (so that ‘8pm’ is actually ‘2 o’clock in the late evening’). People also sometimes use the 12-hour clock and the 24-hour clock, so you can start to see where difficulties may arise. Or maybe they were just using a really odd clock.

Of course, I used a digital watch until I was 22, so maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to criticize.