{"id":38818,"date":"2017-06-14T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T05:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38818"},"modified":"2017-06-04T12:56:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T16:56:30","slug":"qotd-portuguese-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/06\/14\/qotd-portuguese-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Portuguese culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, let\u2019s go back to culture being like the water in an aquarium. Most people aren\u2019t blind to their culture. They know what it\u2019s like and where it stacks in comparison with other cultures, more or less, relatively.<\/p>\n

For instance, Portuguese are well aware of being very unorganized \u2014 and weirdly proud of it. No, really \u2014 and know they stack above Brazilians in organization but below powerhouses of organization like France and Ireland. What they don\u2019t know is how their disorganization\/disregard for times\/disdain for details affects their prosperity, their security and every level of life in the country.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t know this because they\u2019ve never lived anywhere else. Going shopping will take an entire afternoon because the buses run more on suggestion than schedule (and if you drive, the traffic rules are also suggestions, which means sometimes bizarre traffic jams because someone didn\u2019t find a parking space and thought he might as well park on a lane on the road.) Also, the stores might or might not have the same products they had last week, and besides, if the shopkeeper came in late, and then had a really difficult customer, you might have to wait an hour. And on and on. I often say I spent most of my teenage years standing on street corners, fortunately reading science fiction and not going \u201coh, hai sailor\u201d because I got so neurotic about being late for an outing with friends that I got there ten minutes early. And then waited an hour for the first of them to show up and two for the stragglers. This type of thing, over time, eats people\u2019s time and their mental and emotional resources. Frankly, it\u2019s amazing the country works as well as it does.<\/p>\n

And yep, they know they\u2019re unorganized \u2014 they view it was free and not rigid \u2014 but they fail to take into account everything it touches, because \u201cit\u2019s always been like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suspect in the US people would bodily move a car that parked blocking a lane of a two lane road \u201cwhile I go over there to the post office. It\u2019s just a minute. What are you so uptight about that you object?\u201d In Portugal it\u2019s the way it works. (Though I understand if you park on the tram lines and are driving a smart, you will get moved. The occurrence is so common trams have really long poles to assist this move. You should have seen my kids\u2019 faces watching this.)<\/p>\n

Not ragging on Portuguese, really. They\u2019re at worst a second world country. I\u2019m only describing them because it\u2019s a culture I have a lot of insight into. The culture as in all Latin countries, has all the stigmata of Rome, from bribery as a way of life, to nepotism as the oil that lubricates society. Which is not entirely compatible with modernity, and therefore means that Portugal isn\u2019t one of your leading lights of technological creation and innovation.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hoyt, “Water, Fish, Culture and Genes”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2017-05-31.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, let\u2019s go back to culture being like the water in an aquarium. Most people aren\u2019t blind to their culture. They know what it\u2019s like and where it stacks in comparison with other cultures, more or less, relatively. For instance, Portuguese are well aware of being very unorganized \u2014 and weirdly proud of it. No, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,41],"tags":[262,557],"class_list":["post-38818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-quotations","tag-culture","tag-portugal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a66","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38819,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38818\/revisions\/38819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}