School’s out!!

A good indication of the summer holiday is soon here, are all the beautiful sunflower fields…

“We don’t have school tomorrow!” David proclaims as he enters the room. WHAT?? Why not? It is not usual that a school holiday ambushes us and suddenly, we need to change plans. There are quite a few of them, and we still struggle to keep track. First of all; the National Holidays we  pretty much have gotten used to. But the small local ones.?!! It is a jungle! And I know that we are not the only foreign parents who have been standing in front of the school gates on a day off…
The single bank holidays are spread out during the school year and differs from village to village, according to their saints, parties, carnival and so on. One tradition, I find cool though, is that if 1st of May falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the kids will get Friday or Monday off instead. (Public offices, too) The Summer Holidays is loooong, and this year it starts TODAY!! (We got the note about that a couple of weeks ago!) The children returns to school the…hmmmm…(mid september?!) Again I don’t have a clue. And probably won’t have until two weeks before it happens. It is the same every year and as the years go by, you get used to it. In the end of August you start asking around. Have the neighbours heard any date? Nope, well then; I’ll just ask again in a couple of days time! Thank God, that we work and live in the same house. I don’t understand how parents, who don’t work at home, manage to live with this casualness.

It could be nice with a piece of paper in the beginning of the school year, where all the dates of the holidays were listed. But then again, that everything is more relaxed, is one of the reasons why it is nice living in Spain. It is just my Danish “everything-has-to-be-planned-to-the-very-last-minute-at-least-3-months-ahead” that has to be ajusted a bit!