Vacations

Austria has a LOT of vacations. They have about two weeks off at Christmas and Easter and also take off for just about EVERY Catholic holiday, which will be good near the end of the schoolyear once all those random things like Himmelfahrt (Ascension) appear. It WOULD have been good at the beginning of the year too, except all the random "Saint's Day" holidays fell on Saturdays this year. Here's a list of all the random gesetzliche Feiertage:

Neujahrstag (Thu 01.01.2009)
Dreikönigstag (Tue 06.01.2009)
Ostermontag (Mon 13.04.2009)
Staatsfeiertag (Fri 01.05.2009)
Christi Himmelfahrtstag (Thu 21.05.2009)
Pfingstmontag (Mon 01.06.2009)
Fronleichnamstag (Thu 11.06.2009)
Maria Himmelfahrtstag (Sat 15.08.2009)
Nationalfeiertag (Mon 26.10.2009)
Allerheiligen (Sun 01.11.2009)
Maria Empfängnis (Tue 08.12.2009)
1. Weihnachtsfeiertag (Fri 25.12.2009)
2. Weihnachtsfeiertag (Sat 26.12.2009)

And then of course, the Christmas vacation, Easter vacation, and winter vacation, which I had last week....a week off less than three weeks after Christmas vacation ends! AND all the states and some cities have patron saints, so some places get off of school on a certain patron saint's day...

I guess the U.S. probably has the same amount of grade school vacations between Columbus Day and MLK day and Presidents' Day and Memorial Day and the Jewish holidays (seems to be a Long Island-only thing...). I guess Political Leaders:Americans = Saints:Austrians.