Holiday - São Paulo

Photo credit: www.acaloans.com.au

If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be, it would be so nice.
-Madonna

So, today the maid shows up and tells me that she was almost late because of the holiday closure of her kid's school. My reaction was to look at the calendar (blank for today) and then look blankly at her. I believe I put it eloquently as "hunh? what holiday?" except in Portuguese which made it "ah eh? Qual feriado?" Blank look translated well.

Apparently today is "Dia do Servidor Publico". Public Service Worker Day. I have lived in Brazil for eight years and did not know about this holiday. And it is a wacky one--maybe like Patriot's Day in the US, celebrated possibly only by Massachusetts. I am way too lazy this Monday to look that up. Where is my editor? Oh, oops, I don't have one, hence the trouble I usually find myself in.

So public schools have a holiday because the teachers are public workers. But in an interesting twist, the judiciary decided to move its holiday of public service workers to Thursday because, well, I'm not sure. So your kids may have today off, federal judiciary workers, but you don't. Reverse that story for Thursday. True story here. 

Now, I tried to figure out exactly what is going on here in São Paulo in terms of city offices. It's not completely clear. The park service is working. The cultural centers are not. The hospitals are working but the city halls (remember there are sub-city halls) are not. I am not sure that any public worker really knows if they should be heading in or not. Just call the whole thing off. 

Or as Madonna would say...we need a holiday...