Two free daily papers in Luxembourg, L’essentiel and Point24, have found a shockingly simple, yet highly elegant way of avoiding the yearly journalistic summer slump: They do not publish during the summer vacation, but also take time off to go on company holidays.Thus, we have to live with the half-page of daily gossip published on the last page of Das Wort (The Word).

Company holidays (congé collectif / Betriebsferien) are fairly common in Luxembourg. You can find family-owned stores, pubs, and restaurants to close for aproximately 3 to 4 weeks. Construction sites lie idle so that the mainly Portugues workers can use the time of the school holidays to visit family back in Portugal. On the contrary, in Munich (I don’t know about the rest of Germany) street construction sites boom during the summer months as there is less traffic to worry about.

At the end of August, most people will be back in Luxembourg and school starts mid-September so that the streets will be much more crowded than they are now. Thus, right now I enjoy the relative quietness of congé collectif Luxembourg.

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