Ordinary Gweilo

In the UK, public holidays almost always fall on a Monday or are part of a longer holiday.

Not so in Hong Kong, where a public holiday can fall on any day of the week – yes, even Saturday (cue howls of protest from Gweilos working a five-day week who don’t realize how lucky they are).

The weird ones for me are the holidays in the middle of the week – two weeks ago we had Wednesday off so that people could go and set fire to the hillsides, and then on Wednesday 31 May it’s Tuen Ng (Dragon Boat festival).

There is a certain art in booking your annual leave to take advantage of the timing of these holidays, especially as most people in Hong Kong get far fewer days of annual leave than is common in the UK. The key here is finding public holidays close to each other.  Easter, Christmas and Chinese New Year are the obvious ones, but there are a few others.

In 2 weeks time we get Monday and Friday off in the same week (1st May is Labour Day, and 5th May is Buddha’s birthday).  Not exactly a long weekend, but certainly a short week!

This commonly happens with Ching Ming, which frequently crops up in the same week as Easter but sometimes actually merges with the Easter holiday itself – in 1999 it fell on Easter Monday (so the Tuesday was a public holiday), and next year it is on Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday). 

The only problem is that travel agents know all about the public holidays and increase their prices to match.