I hate admitting this. I’m 46, educated and logical, but I don’t TRULY understand how time zones work – when I flew to America from the UK the flight was 8 hours, but when I landed, only 2 hours had elapsed in local time but it’s the same day. Where does the time go? Does it sort of get saved up at the international date line and cancelled or something? I hate admitting I don’t really understand this.
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If you are still having trouble, you’ll need to look into how timezones work at all (and how something can be at 7pm eastern at the exact same time as 4pm pacific). Combined with the idea that a clock doesn’t determine time, it only shows something to humans to help us determine time.
Bonus fact I didn’t see in the other answers: the international date line is a + or – (depending on direction) 24-hour change, so it cancels out the 24 one-hour changes that would have happened if you traveled through all of the timezones in a row (or ran in circles around a pole; no calendar traveling shenanigans here). Time still advances at 1 second per second (not-relatively speaking), no matter what a local clock is telling you.
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