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In contrast, the US federal government observes 10 holidays, and most businesses probably only close for 5 - 7 of those.

http://www.opm.gov/operating_status_schedules/fedhol/2011.as...

When you're an American in Europe for an extended period of time, you feel like everything is always closed (short business hours plus so many holidays). I hear that business hours have been expanding, though.

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Note that the numbers stated by rmc2 are not the number of public holidays, but the number of vacation days you, as an employee, has a year. Typically this is on top of public holidays. Of course, most European countries, IIRC, do not shift holidays that fall on weekends to the preceding or following work days.

Yes there are on average about 8 public holiday 'everyone gets a day off work' days per year on top of those annual leave entitlement (which you can usually take at any time of the year for your own holidays).

And AFAIK European countries do shift days to the next weekend, in fact in some countries (Ireland) that's the legal requirement.

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