Bogota Blogger

Just like in the US, lots of national holidays have been moved to Mondays so that people can have three days off for leaving town.? In Colombia the term for this is puente, which literally means bridge, since it kind of stretches out the weekend, making a bridge between two work weeks.

Most of the holidays in Colombia are religous ones, and a few (Independence Day and Cartegena Independence, for example) are political.? Since the vast majority of Colombians are?Catholic, big Catholic holidays are also national holidays.? But, I’ve asked probably 40 Colombians at least on any given puente what the holiday is all about, and maybe once or twice has anyone been able to tell me.

The problem with the whole country celebrating the same religious holidays is that there’s a mad rush to travel and lots of competition for accomodation and airplane tickets.? Everyone in the country has Easter week off (called Semana Santa), for example, where in the US the weeklong spring break that most schools have can happen anytime from late February till mid April, becuase it’s not necessarily tied to Easter.? Here, in Semana Santa, air fares to popular spots basically double. There’s also very little competition among the few airlines in the country, so Avianca and the others can set fares as high as they like.

This puente that just ended, by the way, was in honor of San Jose (Saint Joseph).? Perhaps it seems strange to move a religious holiday away from the day it falls on just to create a long weekend, but not any weirder than doing the same for a political holiday.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Out of Town Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.