yeah, i get the whiff of that with most of the portuguese i have met so far. passionate and fierce people.

the differences between cultures is so fascinating. bulgarians, and serbs, they also compete with each other, on the west they are very cranky and irritable, so much so that the bulgarian word for serb is related to the word for "irritable" or "itchy", and the serbs love to emphasize their eliding of the L from the name to call them "boo-gars" and yes, actually, this is a reference to the Bogomil cult, which was a weird christian sect that practises, essentially, swinging. the bulgarians are very obsequious and taciturn, and were a huge problem for the ottomans because of their habits built from so many imperial occupations, from the byzantines, to the austro-hungarians and the ottomans, and today, the clandestine opposition to brussels is very easy to see if you just ask random bulgarians what they think of the EU.