It's been so long ago, I don't remember too many details, but someone else may have a better memory and pipe up.
More info:
I've heard a first hand story about a monk there who takes nice photos of animals. He just goes for walks and says, for example, "Snake, come here let me take your photo!" So the snake swims across the lake for a good close up.
You can get lots of great photos that way.
How long it stayed there, or whether (given that it was originly a N.American, thus 60hz/NTSC edition, though perhaps it could detect and switch to PAL operation) it was ever even plugged in, I never found out.
I'm not even sure the monk who I gave the system to (staying in the US for study) had any particular plan for it, though he did know his way around the machine just well enough to run tetris and wordperfect.
For anyone wanting to know a bit more about why this is, here's some additional details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sj868IzNrk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_refraction
Technically, one might also argue something weird like, "If I can see sunlight, it's still daytime" in which case a different phenomina would come into play:
https://www.atoptics.co.uk/highsky/zod1.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light
What this all comes down to is, roughly speaking, even after the sun has technically set, there's still a bit of leeway before we no longer see the sun/sunlight due additional factors.
There are some weird time zones out there.
Russian Orthodox Church also still follows the Julian calendar. Majority of Orthodox countries switched to Gregorian only in the 20th century.
They're also on the Julian calendar, giving rise to their old tourism slogan "13 months of sunshine".
Of course it's not "two weeks ago there", it's just that the date is different: it's as if you tried to use a different calendar system altogether — it's fine, you just need to convert back and forth. FWIW, a bunch of churches (Russian, Serbian, Romanian Orthodox churches) still respect the Julian calendar too, and other than Christmas falling on January 7th in the Gregorian calendar (and Easter calculations using different start points), none of it is particularly notable. Gregorian calendar is not more "correct," it's just better aligned with astronomical events.
Astronomers also take middle of the day as the start of the day (look up Julian Days), because noon (Sun at the apex) is what we can actually observe and measure, so that's not something outrageous either.
Basically, it's "scandalous" type of reporting on different conventions which obviously have no practical matter.
Unfortunately, people do take it seriously, so it's also fine to point it out for what it is.
Even if people were tracking dates, adjusting for a couple of days every 200 years wouldn't be that hard: nobody would remember the good old times when we did the harvest on September 22nd in 1234, and now we do them on September 20th in 1434.
Finally, matching up with astronomical events would sometimes put sidereal year (and day) at the forefront: a day that's ~4 minutes shorter than the solar day making the tropical year Gregorian calendar is based on. Things get murky quite quickly once you start going down that path of what "correct" really is.
Note that in the Gregorian calendar, Spring equinox in 2021 and 2022 fell or falls on March 20th. It's only pretty good when averaged out over a 400-year cycle.
Basically, all of these calendar systems are attempts to "square the circle": find something resembling the least common multiple of non-integer values (solar day length and tropical year length), and then try to mix in a bunch of events observed in a different coordinate system (to overly simplify it, all the night stuff is "sidereal").
So we get back to what is really "useful"?
If you don't care about knowing how many days ago, or on what date in the proleptic calendar of your choice something happened in the past just from the date inscribed on it (eg. imagine a letter dated January 5th, 1605), you would certainly be fine with just dropping 10-13 days somewhere along the way. I can, however, understand when someone thinks it's easier to be off from astronomical events for a few weeks to avoid all that administrative trouble, for instance. However, the biggest practical problem today would be that everyone else has written those 10-13 days off, so it's probably easiest to switch too, especially in the global world we've got today.
But there is nothing intrinsically better in the Gregorian calendar that makes it win on all counts. It's just another agreed-upon approximation.
Earth's rotation is — arguably — better measured against the stars, so a sidereal day is more "correct", yet it would not map to our daily routine at all.
So I believe the question is not what is more "correct" (we've long established that we are dealing with approximations at best, Julian calendar included: it already had leap years), but what is more useful? And that's what has driven adoption of the Gregorian calendar in most of the world, but I am fine if somewhere it's more useful not to have to worry about did some days just disappear at some point in the past.
You also seem to be overstating the importance of exact dates when it comes to agriculture: my experience is that +-13 days does not make a practical difference, especially if it slowly accumulates (it's not like you would suddenly have to do the harvest 13 days later from one year to the next — you actuslly had to do it 10-13 days "early" once the calendar was switched, and it didn't make a difference even then).
If human civilization continued using the Julian calendar, we wouldn't have been any worse off: nothing points at it that we would have been. I am not saying that Gregorian calendar is "worse" at all (though those born on Feb 29 might beg to disagree when they go 8 years between birthdays 2096-2104 :)), just that where it's better does not matter much.
In short: How long it takes to cook an egg doesn't change because someone inserted a leap second.
Of course, when people try to do the obvious thing, and measure time durations using a wall clock, that's when the fun begins. In that world, "a day from now" is not a consistent number of seconds in the future, due to the aforementioned leap seconds, daylight savings time, and, potentially, time zone shifts if the person doing the measuring is traveling, or is (or, perhaps, was) in a particularly "interesting" jurisdiction.
The Oktoberfest is named for the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese in October 1810 and happened in October, until in 1872 it was decided to move the begin a couple weeks earlier, because in Munich the October weather is often very cold and rain-plagued.
Historically the event had a focus on horse racing (and did have a race until 1960). I've heard one of the reasons to move it back was also that the meadows were better for racing in when dry and more likely to be so in September.
> A visit to Mount Athos also involves literal time travel. The monasteries there still go by Byzantine time, in which the day begins at sunset, not midnight, so the time zone changes literally every day. Visitors may have to set their watches back by as much as seven hours as they cross the border. And don't forget to change the date as well. Mount Athos never adopted the new-fangled 16th-century Gregorian calendar; they still use the Julian calendar of the Roman Empire, which lags 13 days behind. It's almost two weeks ago there!