Ethiopia keeps its own calendar of 13 months, running about seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar, one of several facts the Times of India highlighted for travellers in 2019.
Adey Abeba flowers, a symbol of Enkutatash, the Ethiopian New Year (Tewodros Kassa / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Ethiopian year has twelve months of 30 days each, followed by a short thirteenth month, Pagume, of five days, or six in a leap year. The new year, Enkutatash, falls on September 11, or September 12 in the year before a Gregorian leap year. Ethiopia marked the start of its third millennium in September 2007.
The gap comes from a different calculation of the date of the Annunciation, which the Ethiopian Orthodox Church kept when other churches revised theirs. Many Ethiopians today use both calendars, and the country also keeps its own 12-hour clock that starts at dawn.
The Times of India also pointed to Ethiopia as the birthplace of coffee, and to the Afar region, where the 3.2-million-year-old hominin skeleton known as Lucy, or Dinkinesh, was found in 1974.
It noted the country's rich vegetarian cuisine, shaped by the many fasting days of the Orthodox Church, and its history of independence: apart from the Italian occupation of 1936 to 1941, Ethiopia was never colonised.
Sources: Times of India, Wikipedia: Ethiopian calendar