Dinners in Italy were a rather "rowdy" event on most days during my stay in Italy. At least this was the case for the first few months. That's the fun when you have a group of colleagues staying together.
Usually we do our "marketing" at the nearby supermarket after work. Not every ingredient could be found easily in the European environment, but luckily we had some "stock" that we brought from Singapore. Initially we would do the cooking in our own apartments then bring the food to one "selected" apartment for a common dinner. But after a while, we got complaints about bringing dishes from one apartment to another and hence we decided to do all the cooking in one apartment. This could be rather disastrous as we are fighting to use the stove, the oven the basin all at the same time. The kitchen was a warplace during dinner making ;p
Occasionally we get also invites from our Italian counterparts and we also invited them over for dinner.
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| Dinner at Nino's |
When we are lazy to cook and miss Chinese food, we sometimes go to the nearby Chinese restaurant Yu Yuan for dinner. We even had our Chinese New Year reunion dinner there since we were away for CNY that year. The style of Chinese food is not really the same as what we have in Singapore, but we could still find food like fried rice, noodles, so at least it could still satisfy partially our cravings.
As times goes by, we also learnt to venture further, sometimes to nearby towns like Monza and Bergamo for dinner. My favourite pizzeria is Il Cinghei, first introduced to me by a good friend of mine, Andrea. I rememberd the first visit at this place, I wanted to have the tiramisu for dessert. But it was also out of stock. The owner invited me to another dessert, the Panna cotta instead. Over time, we frequent this place and for each visit, it was like visiting a friend.
When I look back at the photos, I realize how these dinners brought us closer together, of course also with much disputes, but we usually manage to patch up afterwards. Sometimes it can be over silly stuff, but well, this is how things are like living together and perhaps through this, we all grew up in one way or another.
