Fascinated by Spanish tradition, and how people in that country have dinner far later than usual, Google engineer Stefano Maggiolo has put together a map to show just how wrong timezones are.

On a trip to Spain, he found himself eating alone in a restaurant at 8pm. It was only once he’d paid and left that people started streaming in. And it turns out that some of this comes down to the fact that sunsets in Spain are artificially late because of the time zone it’s been clumped in. Despite being in a similar longitude to Britain and Portugal, it’s an hour ahead of those countries.

To explain it even better Maggiolo put together a world map he found on Wikipedia, and shaded it to show which parts of the world have timezones that closer represent the actual solar time: that is, when the sun is at noon and directly overhead. A full size version of the map above is available here.

In Johannesburg the solar noon is almost no different to the timezone. But in one part of China the timezone is so far off the solar time that sunrise is at 10am, and sunset at nearly 8pm. And in India, which has a single timezone, the most eastern part of the country greets the day at 4:30am, in the summertime.

Just when you figured out what time is the best to call your cousin in Canada, along comes today’s map and makes you reconsider just how you might be interrupting their dinner.