East Meets West Day

East meets west. It’s a common idiom that has been around for so long that it has evolved to both express agreement and collaboration as well as to describe polar opposites, and just about everything in between.

The distinction between east and west has a lot to do with perception. Take for instance that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. And there have been man made distinctions that have furthered this perception. In 1884, the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, established Greenwich Mean Time, which served as the prime meridian, or 0 degrees longitude, and effectively divided the world into an Eastern Hemisphere and a Western Hemisphere, much like the equator divides the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. From then on, and further widening our perceptions, “Every place on Earth was measured in terms of its distance east or west from this line.”