Now that we've been here for a while, I've been studying the differences between how Americans and Europeans vacation. I am not sure I fully understand all the factors, but from what Swiss and German people have explained to me, this is what I have seen and heard so far:
1. First off, the minimum amount of vacation time that Europeans are given is usually 3 weeks. Even if you just started a new job, you can expect to begin at the company with 3 weeks of vacation. The longer you work there, the more you earn. It's very common to have 5 weeks of vacation that you are allowed to take.
2. Unlike Americans, they will take it all at once. During the summer, usually in August, they'll just leave for an entire three weeks. Sometimes in August it actually feels like the apocalypse has occurred, or that you're in the beginning of the movie 28 Days Later. Post offices, restaurants and businesses will be shuttered up and locked. On July 31, it's a good idea to have lots of toilet paper stored, a vegetable garden you can eat out of, and probably a cow or a goat for milk, or you might run out of household necessities, as well as starve, before they all come back.
3. The other thing is that they will go just one place and spend the entire three weeks there, or divide up their time between maybe two locations. So, they'll rent a cabin on a lake or in the mountains or something and just stay put. They might go out during the days and hike or mountain climb or fish or whatever, but they're going back to the same hotel or cabin or RV or their relative's house every night. The idea of moving from hotel to hotel and from city to city every few days, like Americans do when we're in Europe, seems to exhaust them. It is not their idea of a holiday. It's like they think a vacation is for rest or something. Whatever.
4. Now, obviously, taking more days in a row of your vacation makes for a more expensive vacation. That is why Americans will take just two or three days at a time, or if we're really lucky, a whole week -- we blow our limited travel budget on that long weekend and have to scrimp and save up for two or three months (or a year) before we can afford another three-day weekend trip. Europeans are committed to their three weeks, and seem to find ways to offset the cost.
5. The other thing is that since Europeans LIVE in Europe, it's not like they have this pressure to see as much as they can over a limited period of time. Therefore, they might go back to the same vacation place year after year after year. They know they can always go to Berlin or London or Rome next year.
OK, so with all that as context, Europeans, and especially the Swiss, think American tourists are insane. They don't understand some basic differences:
1. We don't get 3 weeks of vacation. Heck, we're lucky if we get a whole week. Even if we have 3 weeks, we usually aren't allowed by our jobs to take that much time off in a row or else our company will collapse without us. Our bosses make us talk to all our other fellow employees to coordinate our vacations so that somebody is there every day of the year, so that the lights are on and the doors are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, especially Christmas and Thanksgiving. In Europe, the entire restaurant or grocery store is closed for 3 weeks and everyone is gone. For whatever reason, there is no looting.
2. The price of the airline ticket just to get to Europe is equal to the cost of a human kidney. Europeans don't have that expense.
3. If we are going to sell our kidney to afford a freaking plane ticket, we better make the trip worth it. Therefore, we are going to see a different country every day; maybe two countries in one day.
4. America is big. It is nothing to drive 16 hours in a day to go skiing and then drive 16 hours back two days later. So we think it's a fantastic idea to ride a train 4 hours from Paris to Zurich and then, the evening after seeing Zurich, to catch the 8-hour train ride for Rome, continuing like this for one or two weeks.
Europeans think that is insane. You can cross the entire country of Switzerland in three hours. So, for a Swiss person, the idea of driving even 30 minutes somewhere on a Saturday is exhausting, let alone driving the 6 hours from Zurich to Paris for a two-week vacation. If you are a Swiss person going a distance of six hours, you are going to stop and spend the night three times on the way to break it up into manageable two-hour chunks of driving.
And that's why Americans and Europeans vacation differently.
No comments:
Post a Comment