Holidays in China — Myriad Misadventures

No normal post today because I was incredibly tired so Max and I decided to head to the beach this weekend. But why was I tired? Well we just had a holiday. That probably doesn’t make sense so let me tell you about Chinese holidays. The short holidays are fairly normal. Sometimes a random day off, like New Year’s Day, and sometimes longer weekends for holidays that fall or are planned for Friday or Monday. But some of the longer holidays are different.

China’s Golden Week holiday was at the beginning of October, from October 1st to the 7th. So we had no work for 7 days. That seems great. But for some of these long holidays there are make up days. Yup. Make up days. Like when you had a snow day in elementary school and had to make it up at the beginning of the summer. So on the surface it looks like we had a 7 day holiday. But we really had a 3 day holiday. October 1 and 2 were Saturday and Sunday, which are our normal weekend days off (unless you normally or sometimes have to work Saturdays). Then we had three days of holiday from October 3-5. Then we had our next weekend moved to Thursday and Friday October 6 and 7. They. Moved. The. Weekend. That meant that we had to go back to work on Saturday, October 8 and October 8 and 9 were our makeup days then we had to work our normal week starting on Monday October 10. China’s holiday schedules are the worst I have ever had the misfortune to experience. I’d often rather have no holiday at all.

I’m not entirely sure why China does this. I suspect it’s because having more days off in a row encourages people to travel more. And since Chinese jobs often don’t have much time off and some people won’t take it even if they have it these long holidays are some of the only times that people have to travel. More travel means more money spent and that’s good for the economy. In the past I remember having the make up days split up. One extra work day on either Saturday or Sunday on two different weeks. This is the first time I remember them being put together on the same weekend and having 7 days of work in a row, although it may have happened before and I just suppressed it. I’ve also never met a single person who likes how China does these holidays. Everyone hates it. And there doesn’t seem to be ANY benefit to it at all because of China’s “Dynamic Zero COVID” strategy, which encourages people to, you guessed it, not travel. So the question becomes, why have a longer holiday to encourage travel when you don’t want anybody to travel? I wish I knew.

But regardless of whatever was going through the policymakers’ heads we had 7 days off followed by 7 days of work. And I was absolutely drained. That seventh day was absolute hell. I have nothing but respect for people who have to do that regularly for their jobs. So the weekend after (this weekend) seemed like the perfect time to head to the beach to decompress a little. I’d been trying to get to the beach for a couple months without much luck but we managed to get out this weekend. I was worried that halfway through October might be too late but the weather was perfect. So here are some photos from the beach.

COVID has made China a very difficult place to live. It’s pushed a lot of expats to leave and look for greener pastures. When I leave it will probably be because of COVID too but I certainly won’t miss China’s terrible holiday schedules.

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