It’s taken me awhile to get used to my son having basically
just August off for summer vacation, but it’s one of those “not better, not
worse, just different” things. He
does get a week or two off every seven weeks throughout the school year, so it
works out to the same number of hours in school as students in the US, but it’s
still a little funny to not start summer vacation until the first week of
August.
As you might know, Germany is divided into states. The school vacations are staggered
throughout the country, so northern states begin their summer vacation in June
and go back in July, the middle states begin their vacations in July and go
back in August, and the southern states get August off. The reasoning is to keep travel on the
roads spread out through the summer, and to keep hotels evenly booked.
That’s another thing I find unusual – the roads are mobbed
whenever there’s a vacation because people spend the whole summer vacation
actually on vacation in a hotel or traveling somewhere. I grew up with June-August off, and a 2
week camping trip with my family somewhere in the middle of that. Growing up in Austria, my husband always
spent his entire summer vacation in Croatia, literally leaving the day after
school got out & returning the day before it started again.
There are a number of options in Germany for travel during
school vacations and since I work online (I own www.jexbo.com
- a site for self-published authors to buy and sell their own books), I have
the chance to look through a number of travel websites which you might like to
check out: www.germanwings.com is the
discount airline that flies from Germany to a number of European cities. That site has an English option, but a
German site that also has great travel deals within Europe is www.ltur.com.
Whatever your plans are for this summer, I hope you have a
great time!
Posted
Jun 08 2009, 03:58 AM
by
Jill Exler