Thursday June 10, 2004

Slingy Singapore? I prefer Kopi-C.

It should be obvious enough that I'm in Singapore... duh! I have a Singapore category up there! Do you know here's Sun Asia Pacific's headquarters? Ok, big deal.

Geography 101... Pull out a world map, let's start with some landmarks... Australia should be easy to find, just go "down under". Move up, the bunch of big and small islands is Indonesia. Go left and up, you find Malaysia and then Thailand. Great, you just missed Singapore... :( It's that dot somewhere there.

So what's up with Singapore Sling? It's not the national drink for sure, but pubs and hotels make tons of money out of tourists who are generally told, it's a "must try". [sneaky]

Singaporean drinks Tiger Beer and Kopi-O, or Coffee-black.

That brought up an interesting topic, "Kopi". A mutant of transliteration of transliteration (yes twice) and somehow it is generally the only way to order the strong, dark and sometimes lethal wake-me-up from your local "Kopi-tiam" (coffee shop).

"Kopi" obviously sounds like "coffee", and it is, but Singapore actually writes "Kopi" on menus. There is no word in Chinese for "coffee". So when coffee was introduced to China, the words are simply transliteration of "coffee".

When a Chinese "hookien" pronounce "coffee", it became "kopi", due to dialectic accent. Good proportion of Singapore Chinese are hookien, and of course Chinese is not written in latin characters, but Singapore is English speaking, so born "Kopi". [???] Logical?

So Kopi-Tiams serves Kopi, but Delifrance, StarBucks and Spinellis serves "coffee".

"O" as you have guess by now, is hookien for "black". Here's a run down on the variations in case you happen to drop by one of these days:

Kopi, the default configuration is coffee with condensed milk (or sweeteners), no sugar added, or needed.

Kopi-O, is Kopi with sugar, no milk, no creamer.

Kopi-Gau, is Kopi thick, although less water, but same volume at no extra cost. You wonder what's the catch? No catch, as long as you can drink that stuff!

Kopi-C, is Kopi "silky" (I think), which means Kopi with evaporated milk and sugar.

Kopi-Bing, is Kopi-on-ice, no skates or costumes. :)

Now the advanced version:

Kopi-O-Gau, you can translate this by now.
Kopi-C-Gau ...
Kopi-C-Bing ...
Kopi-Bing-Gau ...
Kopi-C-Bing-Gau! I actually love this.
Kopi-O-Bing!!! Rare but possible.

And as always, there's the exception to the rule:

Kopi-Gosong, as in Kopi "plain", no sugar, no milk. The real Coffee - Blank! Ok, black; and "gosong" is Malay word for plain. How's that for a mutant menu.

(2004-06-10 08:07:06.0) Permalink Comments [1]