You aren't going to like this, so I'm pulling on the flameproof suit.
There.
Regular French employees get a minimum of 25 days vacation per year, plus 10 public holidays.
I get:
- 30 days vacation, basic
- 4 extra days for my ex-pat status (because when my employer was founded in 1949, it took 1 days each way to get to your vacation destination, twice a year)
- 8 extra days every 2 years for "home leave" - but that got simplified, so now it's another 4 days a year
- 10 public holidays. But wait, there's more! We're an international organisation, with people in several countries. Some of those have more than 10 public holidays. It would be wrong for them to have more than us, right? So we all get 16 public holidays a year. If there aren't enough local holidays, or if one falls on a weekend, we get the rest off between Christmas and New Year.
Still counting? That's 54 days, where the average American probably gets 10-12 discretionary vacation days plus 10 (?) holidays.
And the worse part? Per Katsmeow, for every day I take off other than general holidays, when I get back, there are 60 e-mails waiting for an answer. It takes me a day to recover from 3 days vacation, plus half a day to recover from that day.
I try to take all of them, but DW can't always come along, and she is consuming days on regular visits to her aging parents. So I'm accumulating days. I have a 3 month final notice period, so my aim is to FIRE with 38 days in the bank from last year, 20 or so from this year (you can't carry days past August), thus saying "I'm leaving in 3 months, but don't expect to see me as from tomorrow".