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While I know the effects that caffeine can have on kids, when I read things like this, all those people from the other side of the pond that I see jumping around at the café and looking like they haven't slept in ages start to make sense... and the faces they make when they see people asking for two expressos in the range of an hour makes even more sense.
You see, our cousins at the other side of the pond, consider that coffee is a mix of a weird black powder that they mix into used dish washing water in the proportions of: one tea spoon of powder for 10 liters of water.
And they call this: coffee...
Now, where I come from, an expresso coffee (the most common) is served in a tiny cup that holds no more than 3 small gulps of coffee and in order to make ONE expresso, we use the equivalent to around 1 and 1/2 soup spoon of coffee.
You probably will tell me how our cousins usually drink that balloon machine coffee... I'll tell you that the coffee proportions we use on those machines, are the same as for an expresso.
This means that our cousins don't drink coffee... or at least, not real coffee. They drink a crappy mix that is tasteless and looks like used up dish washing water.
When our cousins get to my country and are given a decent expresso coffee, they panic and start climbing walls, allegedly because the caffeine is oh so high
In the meantime, us, the locals, take on our second or 3rd expresso of the day (depending on time of the day), look at them with weird looks and shake our heads in contempt for the poor sods that can't even take a tiny cup of coffee without having their nervous system wired up to the martian radios and acting like they're in venus.
If they were to drink one of our "killer strong" expressons, in which the foam is so thick that it can hold the whole 8gr of sugar from the pack, on top, or hold the spoon straight, what would they do? Probably collapse and end up in the hospital with cardio problems or some such and then try to sue for attempted murder (laugh).
The problem is, that kind of expresso is drunk on a daily basis here and no one is required to place warnings around cafés with suggestive titles like: "warning: expresso caffee can kill you", so... sue for what? For drinking an expresso by their own volition? Trying to sue for something like that in my country, will only get you booted out of the court with the judge calling you "raving mad" and the audience laughing their brains out while pointing to you and calling you "retarded".
So, if you're a cousin from the other side of the pond and you visit Portugal, I suggest you keep away from our expressos, unless you want to find yourself at the end of what is for you, a caffeine poisoning. We drink strong coffee, not the wuss stuff that is drank across the pond.
