Kenny and I have been together for almost six years and on the 5th of December, he popped the question and now we’re engaged! We are thankful to everyone who congratulated us but as always, there is always a follow up question, “How did he ask?”. We expected the proposal to be fairly typical. We go on vacation, he asks the question at some pretty place and maybe hire a local photographer to capture it all. I would say that the previous statement is fairly accurate but there’s more to it. Also, I am writing up this story because my dad is convinced that it was a blessing in disguise and the story will go viral (haha, I hope not).
We stayed in Italy for two weeks, meeting up in Milan and then flying out from Rome. When we finally met in Milan Malpensa airport, we were just so ecstatic to start our vacation and actually meet after being apart for seven months (we live a pacific ocean away). Fast forward to the second day of the trip, it was supposed to be a very normal day but it ended up being one of the saddest, weirdest and (once we accepted it), and funniest day of 2019 easily. Sad, weird and funny, are probably three adjectives you would not expect to be used together to describe a happy occasion, but we’ll get there.
Following the usual Milan tour (a visit to Duomo, a stop at Marchesi 1824 at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and a stop at Gucci, lol) we were on our way to grab some pasta, because after all, do you really go to Italy without having pasta? After we got off the subway and started walking towards the restaurant, we saw a cute comic book store and decided to make a quick visit before dinner. As we were checking out the manga section (the manga were all in Italian, if you’re wondering), Kenny started wailing and told me that he was pickpocketed. He told me that he lost his passport, our Eurail tickets and, drumroll please, the ENGAGEMENT RING he was going to use to propose to me. This was a significant moment because, after six years together, this was the most intense emotion I had ever seen from the man I will be marrying. In that moment, the only thing that crossed my mind was “How do we replace the lost passport? Where are the closest embassies?”. We immediately went back to the hotel to check one last time cause MAYBE we accidentally left the items back in the hotel. After flipping over every possible item in the hotel, we finally decided that what’s gone is gone and it’s time for us to make our way to the main train station and declare the missing items at the closest 24/7 police station. Bad news is, describing the crime was very hard when people there barely spoke English. Good news is, the police officers who helped us were some of the sweetest people we met in Italy. The police officers were able to slightly distract Kenny by using more than half of our consultation time to talk about the best cell-phones and how to cop them during the black Friday sale. By the end of our session, it was 9:30PM and we left the police station with a police report and extremely hungry stomachs.
Now that everything had kind of sunk in, over our takeout Japanese food, I asked Kenny to ask me in person right then because I needed to be taken out of this proposal limbo. “Am I an engaged woman, or at least sort of engaged?” Unfortunately, Kenny was too sad that no episodes of Rick and Morty could cheer him up. He told me that, direct quote, “I am too sad to propose” and went to sleep to destress. Obviously being the over thinker that I am, I couldn’t sleep until 4AM. I texted my brother, and then my parents, to tell them what happened. I told my brother first because just in case I was too sad, I could get him to relay the message to my parents like a messenger. I then started researching how to get a passport replacement for Kenny so that we could start moving the next day.
I won’t bore you with the details of how we were able to get Kenny a letter from the embassy so that he could fly out of Italy without a passport. It is time to focus on the fact that, Kenny finally officially proposed (with a fake ring lol), on the third to last day of our trip. As he continued to leave me hanging, he also told me that he booked a photographer to capture the proposal. This was when everything started to click because weeks before I left for Italy, my mom could not stop telling me that I desperately needed to bring a dress for our dinner. I obviously shrugged it off and regretted it later. I can safely say, mothers know best as I had nothing presentable to wear. Since we already hired the photographer, we decided to just go ahead with the photoshoot as we’ll eventually need couples pictures for the wedding.
The proposal happened at Sorrento, which was about an hour away from Pompeii. The day of the proposal, we went to Pompeii in the morning and did a two hour archeological tour. By the end of the tour, I was very tired. That paired with dehydration and delayed train resulted in a very bad mood. Our train to Sorrento was extremely delayed and as a result we only had about 20 minutes left with our photographer. When we got there, I was not having it but our AMAZING photographer, Andre Agallucci, was extremely sweet and nice, making our experience very positive. Obviously, I knew that the proposal was coming, but when Kenny got down on one knee, it still felt so surreal that I cried like a baby. I was shocked that Andre was still able to get some pictures where I still looked somewhat decent.
So there you go, the full proposal story. It has been hard for me to share about my vacation without going on a tangent story time regarding my proposal because it was highly linked to my experience in Italy. If you’re visiting Italy, please please please, take care of yourself and your belongings. I have told this story to numerous people and several of them told me that they also got pickpocketed in Italy. Also, don’t worry, we will still be posting our Italy recommendations because after all that happened in Italy, we still ended up having a great time there! Thanks for sticking until the end of the post, I really appreciate it! Please drop a comment if you have any crazy proposal stories as well! Or maybe some wedding planning tips for me now that we have to start planning!
