A Chinese Holiday — Nonstandard. October holiday is a Holiday with Chinese Characteristics.

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Talking about Chinese language:  a “Holiday with Chinese Characteristics” really means that it is nothing like a holiday at all . . .

According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, Chinese tourists made 428 million trips last week during Golden Week.  See: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/10/12/vote-should-china-scrap-its-holiday-schedule/?mod=WSJBlog

This is too crowded.

We have something called “makeup days” where the Saturday and Sunday prior to the holiday, and Saturday and Sunday after the holiday are work days, which are used to make up for the time off during the holiday.  So I”m not exactly sure about these computations, but it seems that we work a five day week, then a weekend – 7 days. Then we have a holiday of about 10 days, including a weekend, then a 5 day week, a 2 day working weekend, then another 5 day week = 12 days working in a row. If you include the 10 days vacation, then we have 7+10+12 = 29 days. Our routines are disrupted for about a month in order to create this feeling of a national holiday. Of the eight days actually off (not including the weekend, four days are made up. I’m not complaining, but there might be a better way to do this.

If the government wants to give us four days off, maybe we could get two four day weekends: Take Monday and Tuesday off before National Day and then Thursday and Friday  off after National Day. There would be four days off, but they would be grouped together better.  There would be a one in seven chance that National Day would fall on a Wednesday.In that event, perhaps one in seven years, we could have Wednesday off.  In the best scenario, we would have Sat/Sun off, then Mon/Tue (Sept 29/30) off, then the Wednesday (Oct 1) Then Th/Fri, then a regular weekend. That would be a nine day holiday and no disruption of our weekends. On  six  of seven years we would have simply two four-day weekends.

People could take a day or two off prior to the 4 day weekend, or after. There would be many destinations where a 5 or 6 day break would be suitable. Well, just thinking out loud. 🙂