Today's weather: High = 28 Low = 18
Sunny
A friend quote a somewhat humorous statistic on "Chinese holidays", but it was frighteningly accurate into the mentality of how they view holidays. The statistic was bragging rights from the Chinese government about how many holidays their citizens enjoy: about 120 days of the year to be exact!
Sounds like a prized jewel, but not really, because they count the weekends as given stat holidays. Sheez Louise.
This view of weekends being "given holidays" is actually rather frightening. In this frightening Chinese view, the weekends are not entitlements to a day off from work, nor do thy have ANY concept of a Sabbath days rest. None whatsoever. The flipside of this view is that any day of the 365 days in a year is a potential workday. The concept of a weekend is indeed a foreign one. While the Chinese may not necessarily work on Saturday and Sundays, many of them in fact do, and it is hard to distinguish a weekend from a weekday in general terms. For example the banks are always open 7 days a week, the rush hour happens on the weekends too, and people will often ask me, "Are you working today" if it's a Saturday, the same as they'd ask on a Monday.
Given this context, it is extremely common that the Chinese government will use weekends as 'make-up days' for public holidays, such as the recent National Day. The math ends up being very depressing with how this works out. I've already shared it with colleagues but will repeat the dim news over here too.
We got Oct 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 off for National Day. Yes that was 7 staight days in a row but don't go popping the champagne just yet.
Oct 1 and 2 were already a weekend, so in effect it was 5 days off
We just finished working the Oct 8 and 9 weekend as make-up time, so in effect we only got 3 days off
We have to work 7 days straight now, so the two "overtime" days on Thurs and Fri next week (if we make it that far) will chip into more, so we only got 1-2 days off, depending on how you look at it.
Sorry, the whole thing is a fail, and the national holiday becomes useless. Besides the fact that it's crowded and not really a holiday if you're traveling around during that mess anyways, there are no other holidays until New Years break which translates into a LONG stretch of work. 97 days until the next break but who's counting.
The obvious question to ask is WHY they do it like this, but after 10 years of being in China, nobody really asks why. My guess is that the Chinese public simply does not view weekends as entitlements or sabbath rest days the way that western cultures do. In their view, every day is a day to work with no rest, and it's a horrible way to live. Meanwhile, the idea that weekends are "given" as holidays means they can be taken away. This clever little bit of addition and subtraction can be manipulated and propogated as a "golden week" where the public is led to believe they have this awesome long break, and they go traveling in droves and spend tons of cash.
According to the recent newspapers, they traveled in record numbers this past holiday and spent nearly 300 million RMB. Now the party is over, if you can even call it that, and we're making up the time on weekends.
As I told the students in class today, I don't want to be teaching on Sunday just as much as they don't want to be in class, but we all have to suffer together.
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