I'm a simple emigrant and I used to take time off for side projects

And a fair number of my friends didn’t go on vacation at all and simply received at the end of the year a salary recalculation with vacation pay. And then I moved to Germany, where there’s practically no possibility not to take a vacation. In 2024 the residents of Germany went on vacation 68.3 million times! And this is only trips longer than five days. It’s clear that among this figure there are people who go on five and even ten vacations a year, but the number is still impressive, considering that Germany’s population is just over 83 million. Almost a quarter of these vacations went to domestic tourism – not surprising, there are really a lot of beautiful places in Germany. Of foreign destinations, Spain is the most popular: it accounts for 15% of vacations. I’m sure the rating is boosted by Mallorca; it’s even called the 17th federal state of Germany – Germans love it that much. And the reason is very simple: why reinvent the wheel when all your neighbors and relatives have already paved the way, and on the beach, surely, there’s a crowd of your fellow countrymen in Birkenstocks and socks. In second and third places, almost equally, are Italy (8.6%) and Turkey (8.5%). Besides the fact that Germans generally like to go there on vacation, such a large share is also because the first waves of emigrants were precisely people from these two countries. For example, now generations of “local Turks” have grown here. There are so many of them that they are changing modern German, let me know if you’d be interested in more detail about this. As for the number of Turkish businesses I won’t even mention: on every corner are doner kebabs or barbershops. The vacation culture in Germany isn’t quite familiar to us: schedule leave in the calendar, set an out-of-office reply on email, and that’s it; the probability that you’ll be bothered from vacation tends to zero. In most cases, no one even tries to stay connected for work while on vacation. In a similar vein: in some companies they prioritize people with children, because they are heavily constrained in choosing dates for trips with the whole family. Have you already planned your next vacation? Tell us in the comments what you’ll be doing!