Coming to Scotland was a bit of a cultural shock! Not
because of the weather, one only needs to wear more clothes. Also not the food:
dumplings and noodles might be awesome, but haggis is no second to them (I do
miss a good weekend yam cha, though).
What is really shocking here is the lack of public holidays!
Before I moved to the UK I was living in what is perhaps the
most “holidayed” territory in the world, Macau. I guess the reason for this is
that Macau was for 450 years ruled by two of the peoples who enjoy having
public holidays the most: the Portuguese and the Chinese.
So, basically, nowadays there are many kinds of holidays in
that small territory. There are Chinese political holidays, like the day of the
establishment of the PRC but also religious holidays that were abolished in
China with the Socialism, such as the birthday of Buddha. There are Chinese
traditional holidays such as the day to sweep the graves, the moon cake
festival or Chinese New Year. There are also the Catholic holidays, inherited
from the Portuguese, such as Christmas, Easter, Our Lady of Conception or the
day of the faithful departed (which is actually not a public holiday in
Portugal because the day before is, the all saints day).
With all these holidays and with low cost flights to so many
places in Asia departing from Macau, one of the main hobbies in the city is to
plan trips. To me, this trip planning was already natural: browsing the
calendar for the next holiday, check how many days off I needed to take to “bridge”
it to the closest weekend, check promotions of low cost companies, look for
friends who hadn't gone to that destination (an increasingly challenging task,
as everyone was doing the same) and finally, book the trip and buy the fake
lonely planet guide across the border, in Zhuhai, world’s capital of fake
stuff.
The United Kingdom could not be more different! In this country most holidays are just in the calendar, they aren't for real. In the 1st of May, for example, no one would notice
there was a holiday going on. In St. Andrew’s day, the Patron Saint of
Scotland, everyone was working. A lot of other holidays appear in my calendar
but they’re just another day with no difference whatsoever to working days…
Well, this is actually good, because now my financial
situation would not allow me to travel as much as in Macau and I would feel
miserable if everyone but me was doing it!
