How to drink your cuppa. And other Italian quirks.

As I happily ordered my usual cappuccino to go with my eggs benedict brunch, Kristian laughed at my Singaporean coffee-drinking habits. Italians would find it offensive, he joked.

My friend, Kristian, is Austrian by descent, but practically Italian by nature since he's spent the last decade or so living it up in Venice as an industrial designer. (He's supposedly pretty well-respected and regarded in his field, but despite his many attempts at explaining his work to me, I still don't quite get it!)

Anyway, Kristian educated me on the art of drinking coffee, Italian style.

Lesson number 1: Italians don't drink coffee with full meals, much less after them. Coffee is entitled to its own meal slot.

Lesson number 2: Italians only drink cappuccino in the morning. And at the most with a croissant or a brioche (both of which I smugly pointed out to him were French breads. The Italians should be having biscotti instead! He agreed. Ha.)

Lesson number 3: Italians don't have coffee past 1 or 2pm in the afternoon. A shot of espresso and that's it for the rest of the day.

Unlike us ill-breeds who have our kopi fix at every imaginable hour, paired with condensed milk or evaporated milk or lots of sugar. And taken with all sorts of local hawker food.

The Italians would find our bastardised coffee habits abhorrent :)

The other thing Kristian showed me was how to express satisfaction the Italian way.

Eccellente. (Pronounced eh-chay-lent-tay) With a flourish of the hand in a straight line from left to right, forefinger and thumb together facing you, the remaining 3 fingers in a vertical line up facing across, as if pulling a zip.

It's equivalent to our local expression shiok.

I added a little zest to my zip motion by ending with my fingers higher up, a bit like a 45-degree angle line.

No no, Kristian corrected me. It has to be a straight line, like zipping something across. He demonstrated again.

I zipped an imaginary line across from left to right and curved round my back as far as my arm could bend. I'm zipping up something! I quipped and grinned.

My Austrian-Italian teacher could only shake his head in amusement at me.

Maybe I will try it one day, when I'm sipping a cappuccino at 4pm at an al fresco cafe along one of Italy's renowned streets, and do a little zip motion all round back to see what kind of reaction I'll get. I'll probably get thrown out onto the pavement by the waiter :)

[Kristian just told me that al fresco in Italian just means "in fresh air" but not outdoor seating like we refer to it here in Singapore. Talk about lost in translation! The proper translation to refer to outdoor seating should be al aperto -- in the open.]

Random trivia: Illy, Italy's (arguably) best coffee brand, puts its coffee beans through a glass tube with light sensors on both ends to determine the quality of the bean. The glass tube then tilts either to the reject or accept pile depending on the test results. Wow!