Immigrants on the Move

The UK is a country with one of the fewest public holidays in the world, I had to pause typing that as my preset is either to call them bank holidays or fiestas depending on whether my brain is leaning more English or Spanish. Because there are so few, each one is precious and generally the British public can reel off those dates without any prompts.

Our first Easter living permanently overseas was in France, and I excitedly anticipated a nice four day weekend with my husband. At the time I hadn’t yet found work and was experiencing the soul destroying cycle of sending out CVs daily, so the thought of a day doing something other than being home alone was exciting. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Good Friday is not a bank holiday in France. It is also not a public holiday in Italy and in Belgium, among I’m sure many other places.

In the UK public holidays are nearly always on a Monday, if they’re on a Sunday they roll over to the following day. In Spain this was not the case, if the holiday was on a Saturday, and you had weekends off you missed out. Simple. In Azerbaijan the holidays are there, but as the immigrants are majoritively not Muslim and nearly all the holidays are Muslim related the visiting workers are expected not to take the days off. The wages for the economic immigrants is far higher than the wages for the locals, and therefore they are often expected to work six day weeks instead of five, and forego additional local holidays and festivals.

Generally, when I come to festivals, I just wander freely and see what happens. St Lucia.

A definite benefit of living in most of Europe is the bank holidays, they can often be double the number that the UK has and, weekends not withstanding, are often fiercely protected with both the French and the Spanish booking ‘bridge days’ where they will book one day’s holiday in order to get four days off with only one holiday allowance used.

I raced out to do some shopping last Thursday, thinking that with Friday being Good Friday everything would be closed, but of course I forgot I was back in the UK where everything only stops on Christmas Day (and sometimes not even then). I had braved torrential rain in a panic of I’ve only got today, and I could have waited for the better weather of the following day. So be warned, when you arrive in a new place check your bank holidays, I can’t tell you the number of times myself or those I know have been caught out by a Spanish or French public holiday that we hadn’t realised was coming. Even more often, we had no idea what the reason was behind that festival. In fact, the Spanish holidays are often by region, and we were lucky enough to be just fifteen minutes from Murcia where we could, in an emergency, rush over and grab those last minute supplies.

Do you know all the bank holidays where you’re living now?