Our Engagement Story ;)

4 May 2007

I had just graduated from Intel school at Goodfellow a couple Wednesdays before... My mom and I had hopped aboard Gus Jr. and drove as fast as we could out to the East Coast, where she and Adam helped me move into my new place (many a “How do you have so much stuff??!” were uttered those few days, lol). Adam came out for dinner a couple times that week and mentioned that he'd like to take me out to dinner to celebrate my first “real Friday in DC.” It sounded great to me! Mom had a flight back to Austin that Friday evening, but before she left, said, “Now Choi, I don’t know whether anything’s going to happen tonight… if Dad or Aaron know anything, they aren’t telling me… but I want a message of some sort on my phone by the time I land!” I agreed, LOL. Adam drove out to pick me up after he finished work that afternoon. Now, I’d been getting a wee bit suspicious about this “dinner” of his, but he’d had such a stressful week at work that I’d convinced myself it wasn’t the big night. In fact, I felt a bit guilty that he felt he had to take me out at all! He picked me up after fighting traffic for over an hour… poor guy… and we drove back into town. Somewhere along the way, he asked if I’d brought my camera (his had been annihilated in a bicycle incident a few weeks before). I hadn’t, so we swung by a grocery store near his apartment to pick up a little disposable one before dropping his car off to take the metro downtown. I’d asked where we were going for dinner and he told me to an Italian restaurant we’d seen during one of my visits back in January. I didn’t think much of it… if anything, it further reinforced my assumption that this was just a nice Friday dinner. We wandered around for bit, while Adam, I found out later, pretended to be lost… “I think it’s this way…” We came upon a large marble landing called Freedom Plaza, which I immediately recognized from my trip in January (it’s a little bigger than a large lap pool with a map of DC etched into the stone plates on the ground). Now, the last time we'd been there, he’d teased me, “Now, wouldn’t this be the perfect place to propose? If I had a ring right now, I would do it...” I piped up this time, “Wait, I know where we are! We’ve been here before!” He thought this amusing, “Really?” I responded, “Yes, you were being mean about a pretend proposal.” He thought this even funnier, “The city lights look really cool, let’s take a picture," and squatted down to pull the camera out of his backpack. By now, I was really suspicious, but in all honesty, I was expecting him to actually take a picture! I was looking at all the city lights when I noticed he hadn’t pulled the camera out of his bag, but rather something else. I could hear myself audibly gasp, lol! He was on one knee, “Choi Bo, will you marry me?” It was adorable. If you can imagine a shy little five year-old asking you to marry him, this would be it. I couldn’t see his familiar grin because it was hiding behind the ring box :) but I saw the smile in his eyes. I don’t really remember exactly what happened after that… I was on a high!… but I do remember saying "yes" and noting that I’d never felt so happy in my life! He then took me, not to the Italian restaurant, but rather to the Willard Hotel (his careful research told him that every president since Pierce has stayed there) where the most romantic restaurant in DC was located—the Willard Room. And my, did it live up to its reviews! It was utterly amazing. We laughed at the apparent wait-staff prerequisite that you must speak with some form of accent. That evening, we were introduced to a rare, wild mushroom risotto appetizer that "called for a trained hunter to scour the Shenandoah Valley in search of the little mushrooms that grow in only one location in the whole world"… now, after a story like that, we just had to try it! Our waiter asked if we were celebrating anything special. We told him the good news, and after dinner, he brought us a beautiful plate of chocolate truffles, some of the yummiest cookies we've ever tasted, and small bouquet of red roses as a congratulations from the restaurant :) We were about to take a picture of the dessert plate (it had “Congratulations” written in chocolate syrup), when he offered to take one with us in it. Adam pulled out our little disposable and said, “We left our digital at home…” The waiter laughed and took our picture anyway ;) After he left, Adam leaned in and said, “Somehow, at a place like this, I felt like we needed to caveat our disposable with a ‘We left our digital at home’…” ;)

I can honestly say, it was the best and most perfect night of my life, and I can hardly wait for what’s to come!

P.S. The rare mushroom risotto was to die for :)