Monday is a government holiday in Austria, and even better, it’s one of the holidays that the UN observes for their employees, so Dan doesn’t have to go to work.  Great!  We’re really excited to have a three day weekend, and there are some things we’ve really been wanting to do and to get done, so it comes at a great time.  We didn’t find out about this until yesterday, so it came as a complete surprise to us.

It’s a weird sensation to be taken by surprise by a holiday.  (This one, Whit Monday, I had to look up, because I didn’t even know what it was.)  We’re still adjusting to things here, and it often occurs to me that once we adjust, it’ll be time to go home.  I know that at some point in the past few months, we’ve read a list of the holidays for the UN employees (in fact, I know we’ve read it several times) but it just hasn’t sunk in.  We’re just getting past the point of being in a kind of “panic” mode, where we only had time to focus on things that had the potential to wreak havoc — things like work holidays, being good news, just didn’t sink in.  But that kind of makes it extra special, because finding out at the last minute, it’s less like a holiday, and more like getting an unexpected snow day in the middle of June.

Dan has 10 work holidays here, similar to what he had at home.  Some are the same (New Year’s, Christmas) while many are obviously different (no Thanksgiving or Independence Day) with an strong emphasis on religious holidays here (Good Friday, Easter Monday, Whit Monday) and some that just make sense (UN Day, of course!).

For now, we’ll take it.  On the list of things we’ve found out about that have come as a bit of a surprise, an unexpected day off of work rates pretty pleasantly.