I am not Portuguese but live here for some years now. It surprises me often how happy Portuguese can be with minor details that work while there are so many much more serious problems.

For example: some years ago several people mentioned the roads of Portugal were the best of Europe. I had a hard time believing because many local roads were worse than I remember from most countries. After the 3rd person or so I started wondering and looked it up. Turned out this was only for highways, which Portugal has only a few and build with EU money. Plus Portugal was actually only second, the Dutch highways were the best. Something I suspect at that time was not really frontpage news in the Netherlands. Until today many local roads are very bad.