Jessica Furseth frequently maximized long weekends by padding vacation days to visit European cities while minimizing PTO use. Those frequent short trips left her exhausted after about 15 years of full-time work, with never more than five consecutive workdays off. Her mother urged taking at least two weeks to properly unwind. Norway maintains a tradition called Fellesferien, evolving into Sommertid, when many workers take three weeks off between late June and mid-August. Norwegian law grants a right to a three-week summer break between June 1 and September 3, though full practice varies by industry.
Through my 20s, when I spent my days working in London media offices, I used to carefully allocate each vacation day for maximum bang for my buck, padding out weekends so I could catch flights on Thursday nights and return Sunday afternoon, all with minimum cost to my annual PTO allowance. I used this method to go on adventurous if hectic trips to Cinque Terre in Italy, Dubrovnik in Croatia, and Athens in Greece, going straight back to the office after a non-stop weekend.
As she spoke I felt a vague memory surfacing of " Fellesferien" - the joint vacation period when Norwegians are off work en masse during the last three weeks of July. Popular in the 1920s and 30s, the term referred to when businesses closed up shop for a few weeks and gave everyone a summer break, but these days it's only really practiced by a few industries.
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