A few years ago I was introduced to a charming and beautiful young woman from Albania. Over a 2-year span, I slowly tricked her into marrying me, and leaving everything she knows. This week marks our 2-year wedding anniversary, and I thought I would compile some thoughts, observations, and funny stories from the first 2 years of our marriage.
For those of you who don’t know, Albania is on the Adriatic Sea, just north of Greece. I like to joke with my wife that if the Jews were looking for a land flowing with milk and honey, that whoever settled Albania was searching for a land flowing with sticks and donkeys. The truth of the matter is, it’s actually a very nice place, with lovely people. The life there is very different, and my wife is the bravest person I’ve ever met for being willing to leave everything she knows and loves to come live in a new country with a brash, overbearing, semi-narcissistic loudmouth like me.
One of the big differences between Albania and the US is the food. In Albania, and much of Europe for that matter, food is not purchased from a single location. Rather, you buy certain items at specialty stores (e.g. bakeries, butcher shops, etc.), and general goods from small markets. In America obviously, we do must of our shopping at large super markets, where enough food is available to feed an entire city several times over. It’s easy to forget this; as for me it’s what I’ve always known. The first time my wife stepped into a grocery store, she just stared in awe. Never in her life had she seen to much food in one place. This would have been quite sweet, if not for the fact that we were there to bake a cake.
In Albania, a family friend had introduced us to a cake named ‘Tres Leche’, meaning the 3 milks. It’s a light cake, soaked in a mixture of milk, cream, and caramel. While my wife had the recipe, the ingredients didn’t exactly transfer. Thus, a 15-minute trip required nearly an hour of scouring the isles, looking for items she thought were the ones she wanted. After nearly 50 minutes, the frustration of an ordinarily simple task requiring so much effort, was really taxing my wife’s patience.
Before we go any further, I should mention how patient my wife is. She’s so patient, that even though she lives with me, and has to listen to me ramble on a daily basis, she only gets upset about once a week to 10 days. She calmly listens to me go on, and on, and on about things I’m very interested in. Things she either has no interest in, or doesn’t understand. For example, as a software engineer it’s not uncommon for me to design a solution, and being so talkative, I want to share it with someone. My wife, being so close, can’t get away. I drag her into my office, and draw these extensive diagrams explaining whatever I just built, and why it’s so cool. She never gets upset, or says she’s bored. She simply smiles and tells me how cute I am, and then goes back to whatever she’s doing.
So, back to the story of the Tres Leche. We’ve found all the ingredients, except the caramel. Now according to my wife, we need something called ‘crème caramel’. I tell her we have it, but it’s called something different. I show her the display of ice cream toppings and explain the jar of whatever she’s looking for is undoubtedly there. My wife, was at that point, pretty irritated. You see, we’ve had this conversation before:
Loci: I need [cake ingredient].
Me : This is it.
Loci: No, it’s different.
Me: It’s the same.
Loci: It’s different, I’m telling you!
Me: Listen foreigner, the name is different, but the item is the same.
This went on and on for nearly every item on the list. So, by the time we got to the caramel, which is apparently the most important ingredient, she was a bit…frazzled. Thus when the above conversation started again, she had had enough. Grabbing one of the containers, she opened it right in the middle of the store, stuck her finger into the caramel, and tasted it. Then, slamming the top back on, she yelled:
“See! I told you it’s different!”
She tried to throw it back onto the stand. Mortified, I yelled:
“You can’t do that! We’re trying to have a civilization here!”
While we eventually found the toping she wanted, I calmly explained, we couldn’t leave the open caramel there, and had to purchase it. My wife again tried to put the opened item back on a shelf, saying that in such a large store, ‘Who would notice?’ I thus was forced to carry the undesired caramel for the remainder of our time in the store. We still have that caramel somewhere at my parent’s house.
The ingredients purchased, we returned to my parent’s home to bake the special desert. It was during this time, that I realized my wife and numbers will forever be at odds. Not dissimilar to the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland, the fight will wage for decades, with no one sure how the bitterness started, only sure their side hates the other.
The way I discovered this antipathy for numerals, was during the measuring process. As I mentioned, the recipe was from a family friend in Albania, which, like much of the world, uses the metric system. However, being in America our measurements are in a system only we use. My wife likes to point this out to me all the time, at which point I remind her we put a man on the moon, and we’ll use whatever system of measure we please.
While measuring out the necessary portions, I calmly explained we could calculate the needed cups/teaspoons/tablespoons/etc. from the indicated milliliters and centiliters. While this was a good plan, anyone who’s done this kind of conversion knows garbage in = garbage out. Something was lost in translation, and the amounts got all confused. The cake as a result suffered. By suffered, I mean, came out like a brick. I’m not kidding, we could have sold this recipe to developing lands, and they could use it to build their infrastructure. Maybe that’s how the cake was discovered in Albania to start with.
Not wanting to upset my bride to be, who had literally been on American soil for less than a week, my entire family attempted to eat the cake. In retrospect, a glass of milk would have gone a long way, but sadly the entire stock of diary in the home had been used to A) bake the cake, and then B) soften the resulting brick. As mentioned, the latter operation failed miserably because the cake was waterproof at this point. Consequently, we had no milk to wash down the resulting caramel flavored gravel. We all smiled at each other as we chewed, wondering how much of the dish decorum required, and how soon we could call a dentist.
My father still tells this story, to anyone who will listen. My wife on the other hand remains mortified, but laughs each time, because she’s the best. However, she’s still trying to get this recipe right. No success yet, but we’ve got a lovely little retaining wall in our backyard.
