Paulo Rebêlo

Paulo Rebêlo
The Budapest Sun - 13.junho.2007
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After almost one year living in Budapest, if someone asks me to make a list of what I have learned or what most caught my attention, it would be a problem to fit everything in this space. What I know for sure is what I will miss, some things more than others, of course. Usually, what catches your attention is not something necessarily good or bad, but the unexpected. And the first thing to catch my attention, completely unexpectedly, was the different treatment you get being a foreigner and being a Hungarian.
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Paulo Rebêlo
The Budapest Sun – 09.maio.2007 – link original

Excessive bureaucracy is part of eastern Europe folklore. You will always find yourself in a situation when a bureaucrat is behind a desk and you’re the next in line. He’ll make a fuss about forms and different offices you should go, sometimes related to small and insignificant things that do not make sense at all.

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Paulo Rebêlo ( email )
The Budapest Sun - 11 .April. 2007
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Those that say there is a coffee tradition in Budapest are not telling the truth. At least not exactly. That does not mean to say they are lying. Most probably they just do not appreciate coffee enough to realize how difficult it is to find good coffee around here. Or maybe they are not as addicted as the average Latin American.
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Paulo Rebêlo
The Budapest Sun - 14.mar.2007

Is Budapest a big city? It depends on whom you ask. One of the demographic oddities of Latin American countries is the general absence of medium-sized cities. We have huge metropoli - usually capital of a State - where most people live nowadays. And then we have thousands of small cities, especially in the rural areas. In Brazil, this is particularly odd, because the landmass has such continental measures that, in theory, we should have more medium-sized cities and less populated mega- cities.
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Paulo Rebêlo
The Budapest Sun - 14.fev.2007 - link original

You have just finished a delicious duck breast with croquette potatoes. You are feeling good after the nice wine, directly from the Hungarian countryside. The palacsinta pancake for dessert was marvelous. You are full, your belly feels happy (and bigger) and all you want on Earth right now is to pay the bill, go home and have a good night’s sleep. There’s only one problem: you can’t leave the bloody place.

No matter how hard you try to look for the waiter, or raise your hand once in a while, no one will see you. No one will notice that you are done and want to actually pay; they will make you wait until a good soul finally comes to see if you need anything. When they realize you just want to pay and leave, they will make you wait again. And then a bit more.
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