Watching the French take their famous 4 week vacations in the summer is truly something to behold. Somewhere between the start of July and the end of August, all of my co-workers are leaving the city for 3 to 4 weeks. One smart person is delaying his holiday until September, thus allowing him 2 quiet months at the office followed by a month away when everyone else is here. What is not really clear to me is exactly where all these people have gone. A lot are at the Riviera, but I didn't think they could accommodate the entire population of Paris down there.
We are in the heart of the holiday period right now, and you can't walk down a street in my neighborhood without seeing shops, bakeries, and small restaurants with signs on their windows announcing they will re-open at the end of the month. This coincides with noticeably warmer weather, but it hasn't gotten too bad yet, and I enjoy a less crowded and quieter city.
While I cannot take 4 weeks off (and indeed since 75% of my work here involves the Anglophonic world, I am busier right now than I have been in several months), I was able to take advantage of a peculiarity in the 2008 calendar. Both May 1 (Labor Day) and May 8 (what we would call Victory in Europe Day) are national holidays here. This year, both fell on Thursdays, so our office was closed on the following Fridays as well. Better still, the Monday after Pentecost Sunday is a holiday in France. Like Easter, Pentecost is not a fixed date, but this year it happened to be May 11. Thus, I had a 4-day weekend for Labor Day followed by a 5-day weekend for V-E Day and Pentecost.
As for myself, I hope to pull off a 2-week vacation at the end of my stint here (negotiations will soon begin on that). I haven't had more than 1 week off at a time since I joined the workforce 7 years ago, and never thought I would have the chance to take 2 weeks off until paternity leave, which is probably not particularly imminent.
2 comments:
My client site in StLouis is owned by a large company based in France. Many employees go on epic vacations in the summer; I just learned today that they tend not to use "out-of-office" alerts on their email: they just pack up and head out.
I guess there is a tacit understanding that if you don't hear back in a couple of days that they are en vacances
Captain Italics Fan Canuck
Well, that's a little annoying. Maybe they are a little embarrassed to create an e-mail alert that announces to Americans that they are gone for 4 weeks. Still, though, the out-of-office automatic response is the greatest invention in the history of Microsoft.
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