Annual vacations

Well we returned from our annual vacation yesterday.

Last year we had 3 weeks visiting my wife's family in Thailand.

This year Thailand disappeared early from the agenda (not enough money), while the UK disappeared shortly after (see earlier posts on this subject, thankfully we decided not to feed the British paranoia about foreign nationals, that said even I would never have imagined that the UK would get so paranoid that it had even started spying upon modern democratic Germany - theoretically an important ally!).

So eventually it became a return trip to .... Köln/Cologne. For 4 days. In a cheap hotel near the Mauritiuskirche. In between Neumarkt, the Rudolfplatz and the Zülpicherplatz for those who know the city. Four days wandering all over the main part of the city, revisiting haunts that we used to frequent when we lived there in 2003 and 2004 (the ones that were still there at least), visiting my former landlady, a Doctor in Psychology (great having conversations with really intelligent people - nice as well that she hadn't forgotten us after nine years).

And reminiscent of Manchester (UK, not NH), where I also used to live, it rained almost non-stop for four days. Managed to get a glass of Kölsch (Cologne's local beer) on my final day to remind myself of good times past. Pity that the good times always seem to be in the past .... Now with some economic positivism and creating the sort of economic environment about which I am always talking - capitalism working for the masses and not just the mega-rich - then the good times could return.

As it is most people in Europe actually seem to support the Scrooge economy apparently (see the Pew Global Attitudes report on the subject), so don't expect the good times to return any time soon!

While supping on my glass of Kölsch and talking to a couple of total strangers in the bar where I was (one a native of Turkey - hope that he was a lapsed Muslim, or he will be permanently damned for drinking alcohol! My wife meanwhile was back in the hotel watching one of those awful talent shows that she loves so much, and which she could have watched at home in Frankfurt), I got round to thinking about vacations in general.

Europeans have longer holidays available to them generally than Americans. Out of this has sprung a major tourist based industry. Travel agencies provide thousands of jobs for people advertising holidays and booking them for people to use with the extra vacation time that they have available. This in turn creates large numbers of jobs in the airline industry, plenty of charter companies have sprung up to absorb the gaps in the schedules that the major airlines cannot provide usw.

Hotels in Spain and Greece get tons of business as a result (sunny, warm and relatively cheap). If you think that things are bad now in Spain and Greece, wait till you cut the vacation possibilities for people in other parts of Europe, and people haven't the time to visit.

What would happen to the tourist industry in Spain and Greece and how many more unemployed would there be?

But I keep hearing from Americans that Europeans don't work hard enough (totally wrong IMHO - particularly when you emphasise quality over quantity - an idiot can spend 16 hours working a day and produce nowt, a highly talented person can work for 3 hours and produce tons of good stuff - like I used to in my IT days). And they take too many holidays.

However, as taking those holidays produce employment elsewhere. Think about the consequences for a minute. There are spin-offs! See above.

Myself I never used to take the full holidays when working and I always disliked public holidays. As an atheist I have no hang-ups about working on Sundays or on "religious" holidays - why not work on December 25th? It is just another day on the calendar.

When working in Munich in 1995, I flew on Lufthansa to Berlin in the morning and back on the last flight available (about 1600 - they cut the evening shift). The crew were all working, very cheerful and not complaining at all! The one plus from my perspective was that the price was dirt cheap (they wanted to fill the planes, so ....). Just another day on the calendar. And a very enjoyable trip I would add.

Most people coming back to work from vacations tend to be more optimistic and tend to work better, in my experience. It is a false economy often to tie people to their desks or factory stools and grind work out of them. But as the world is increasingly driven by false economies, we should not be surprised if such attitudes come increasingly to prevail - to the detriment of businesses elsewhere.