Vacations, Holidays, Time Off

As I've posted on my blog before, I'm now temporarily living in Ireland.  My company has relocated here from California, and we've agreed to move to Dublin for two years.  I've made many observations about how life here in Europe is different from the US, and even the Philippines.  Today, I'm posting about one aspect in which I believe the US should follow suit: vacations (or holidays as it is referred to here.)

The Irish sure love to take their vacations!  Some info:

• The standard mandatory vacation time is 20 days per year.  (In the US, you get a measly 10 days.) That's a whole month, people.  This of course increases with position/rank, amount of time at your job and other factors.
  
• On top of that, in Ireland, you get 9 public holidays per year.  Mind you, these aren't all on -real- holidays such as Christmas, Easter, and the like.  They even had to make up 'bank holidays' as an excuse to take some more time off.  These are scattered amongst 4 Mondays throughout the summer.
• Plus you get the customary sick and personal days on top of that.
• The vacation business is huge here in Ireland.  It's everywhere online, newspapers and the many travel agencies you'll find at malls and such.
  

In all, for my situation, I get almost two months' time off this year.  Yay!  This almost balances the pains of being away from home since our family has a lot of learning and exploring to look forward to over the next couple of years.

Being in Ireland, and with the availability of low-cost carriers, it's (relatively) affordable to see the rest of Europe.  This is our plan for the next two years.

So, my wife and I sat down last week, pulled out a calendar, and started planning our vacation schedule for the year.  So far, here is what we have:

• April: Trip home to California for a week.  We need a quick sunshine fix and visit with family. We might sneak in a quick trip to Vegas as well.
• May: Planning to do a quick four-day weekend this month.  Not sure yet where we're going, but likely somewhere close by, either in Ireland (Galway, Belfast) or Scotland or Wales.
• July: Week in Spain.  We are exchanging part of our timeshare in Vegas for a week at one Marriott's beach resorts in either Malaga, Marbella or Ibiza which are in the south of Spain.  We're still working out the details and picking which resort to go to.
• July, August, September:  These are the summer months which we plan on taking every opportunity to go out and explore.  We're still working on plans for these, but places on our radar are:

• Rome, Italy
• Venice, Italy
  
• Barcelona, Spain
• Stockholm, Sweden
  

• October: Halloween in Paris.  We exchanged the other half of our Vegas timeshare for a week at the Marriott's Village d'Ile-de-France which is right beside Disneyland Paris.  We'll spend the week visiting the usual Paris landmarks.  It'll also be a good opportunity for the kids to spend Halloween at Disneyland.
  
• December: Christmas and New Year's in London/Belgium/Amsterdam. Last December, we had a rather quiet new year's eve with just my wife and two kids.  The kids were already asleep, and my wife and I huddled in front of the TV with a slice of cake and watched the celebrations in London.  They had quite a fireworks display which cost several million Euros, some free concerts, and a parade the next day among other things.  We knew right then that we had to be in London this year, so that's the plan.  The Christmas holiday is quite long (12 days) so we plan on taking a train to Brussels, Belgium and/or Amsterdam during this stay as well.

As you can see, we're really taking advantage of this opportunity.  Can't believe we actually have time this year to do all this. 

...plus we have 2008 to see the rest.