France seems to have so many bank holidays that I just can’t
keep track of them. Often the only
advance notice I get is when I see a sign on a supermarket door stating that
they will be ‘exceptionally open’ on a certain date – which is a sure sign that
just about everybody else will be closed that day and it is a public
holiday. I don’t even know how they
manage to find the time to work the 35 hours a week that they are all
complaining about, when most places are closed on Sundays, lots of places are
closed on Mondays, and as many places as possible seem to close at lunchtime.
In the UK, if a public holiday falls on a weekend it is
shifted to a Monday - in France, if Mayday is on a Sunday then that is just your
back luck that you get a ‘day off’ on a day that you would not be working
anyway. But the french do find a
brilliant way to compensate in other ways; if the public holiday falls on a
Thursday or a Tuesday, ie close enough to a weekend, they then take the day in
between and call it a ‘bridge’ – therefore taking 4 days off in a row!
May is always a minefield of public holidays – with some
years as many as 5 falling in the same month. This year there are ‘only’ 4 –
but if you count all the ‘bridges’ there is every possibility that some people
will manage 15 non-working days this month!
