10 Best Memories with Angel - Celebrating a Decade

2018 marks a decade from the long-distant 2008 when I first met Angel. If we're being precise, we didn't meet till later in the year, but this year I'm celebrating the fact that he's been changing my life for 10 years now.

Because we're celebrating Valentine's Day today, I wanted to share 10 of my most treasured memories of the last decade:

1. My first favorite memory is of glancing out at the parking lot and seeing his raggedy teal Ford parked next to my Chevy...nearly every day of second semester my freshman year. Every time, I'd turn away from the parking lot window with a grin. After moving across the world to go to college in Michigan, leaving all my friends and the places I was familiar with behind, it meant a lot to be included and "known" by new friends. Just one of those friends was weird enough to park next to me and sit at my homework table to study with me every day...even though he was doing NCLEX prep and I was studying Mandarin Chinese.

Me: 17 years old, just finished freshman year. Him: 24 years old, just graduated with his B.S.N.

JUST friends!!

2. When he came back to Michigan to visit for my Spring break in March 2010 after we hadn't seen each other for 10 months. We both knew that that Spring break might be an official beginning to the rest of our lives together...or that it might not. He met my parents over Skype and officially requested to court me, received an application, and later in the week, very nervously prepared for an interview with my parents. He was so scared--I remember him hugging me before the interview and telling me he was very sorry if they said no, and he was pretty sure they'd say no. I was pretty sure they were going to say yes. As soon as Skype connected, my mom exclaimed, "When I read your application, the first thing I said was, 'I want to BE Angel when I grow up!'"
Angel was still nervous, because he didn't know why she said that. But, safe to say, my parents didn't reject his application, and the next day, I dropped him off at the airport to go back to Texas. At the airport, he said he wasn't a fan of PDA and I said that's totally fine by me and thirty seconds later he kissed me goodbye so...??? Still wondering.

Me: 18 years old, in my grandparent's living room, meeting Angel for the first time in nearly a year.

3. When he came to visit Malaysia in July 2010. He said it was really important to him to meet my family in real life and get to know this home of mine. Greeting him in the airport in Malaysia was the first time I'd seen him since saying goodbye to him at the airport in March. He proposed two days into the trip, which was a good thing, seeing as all the invitations for our big engagement party on his last weekend in Malaysia had already been sent out. Seeing him adjust to the heat and the food and the public bathrooms and the culture was rather amusing for me, and I'm so glad that he got to know my community here before our marriage even began.

4. Our first day of marriage. I don't have terribly clear memories of Angel at the wedding...I remember my own relatives and our guests much better. But our very first morning of marriage, the first morning in our new home together, we both woke up very early on that chilly December day--me to clean up and organize all of the wedding presents we'd opened the night before, and him to vacuum all the glitter out of the car (glitter that had been generously applied by my uncles the day before). After that was done, we got in the car to go out for breakfast, and Angel pulled down the visor because it was sunny, instantly dumping the load of glitter that had been hidden between the visor and the roof of the car. I laughed my head off and held my visor up the rest of the drive so that he couldn't dump glitter on me. After breakfast, we sat down on the floor, because we didn't have chairs or tables, and, together, wrote all of our thank you cards for wedding gifts. It was so fun, and probably not the way most people envision the first day of marriage, but so very "us", and the memory is precious to me. On our second day of marriage, I went back to college and Angel went to the post office to mail all those thank you cards.

19 and 26 years old, first day of marriage, before breakfast!

5. Dates to Craig's Cruisers. I like food, but sitting down at a restaurant is not the most thrilling date ever. In the USA, our favorite date was to go to a local arcade and "fun center" called Craig's Cruisers, and play mini-golf or arcade games together. This is the sort of arcade that gives you tickets you can exchange for prizes (the only sort of arcade worth going to, in my opinion), and we spent many a fun hour together there. In fact, we saved up our tickets for a couple years with the intention of someday exchanging them for a really big, really cool prize...and then when we decided to move overseas, we realized it was time to spend all of our tickets. I blogged about this experience, but the gist of it is in this photo: we traded our tickets for a ridiculous amount of candy.

6. Going to Hawaii together. I have many good memories of other trips we've taken together, but something about that vacation was simply the best ever. The whole vacation was Angel's idea in the first place, but I planned it, and my main theme was "as free as possible" because we were between jobs and between homes in the USA and China, and the whole trip was perfection. We hiked all over the place, walked long distances along roads because of getting off at the wrong bus stops, ate food from grocery stores, wandered the beach, and had so much fun together.

7. Basically the entirety of our life in China together is one big amazing memory. It was a strange switch of roles for us: while he's normally the more outgoing person, who deals with strangers and makes food orders and such, because I spoke and read Mandarin far better than he did, I was now the one to communicate with the rest of the outside world, and navigate, and read bus routes. We wandered into all the nooks and crannies of our neighborhood, discovered favorite new snacks and ma-n-pa food joints, ordered dishes that we had no idea what they were, loved our jobs, got interviewed for local television, and basically had the time of our lives.

8. Telling him about both of our babies--our first, and then this one. Both so loved and longed for with not so much patience.

9. Finally visiting California with him. We were married over six years before I'd even had a chance to see his home state, and it was very special last May to spend a few days in Southern California having a local boy show me around. His ideas of highlights are maybe not the same as actual highlights of Southern California: "And here is the panaderia which was next to my school that had the best conchas ever." But it was so fun and so special. I think my favorite part was Joshua Tree.

10. Ten years can create a few too many memories, so it's hard to choose, but for this last one, I'd say just in general, the memories created by all of the weird and unexpected things Angel does--both on purpose and through absentmindedness. His oddities have brought so much entertainment to my life, like the time he 'accidentally' bought a bear costume on eBay. Or hung a black sock on the wall and tried to trick me into thinking it was a bat because he knows how blind I am. Or the countless hours I've spent sitting on benches in shoe stores while he looks for the perfect pair of shoes at the perfect price (I know way too much about running shoes for a non-athlete at this point). Or all the times he's locked us out of our cars. Or forgotten his wallet somewhere. Or the fact that by now, I think it's totally normal that he has to switch the car radio to a different song every 30 seconds or less because he can't sit through an entire song (the only time I realize that this isn't normal is when the car is full of friends and family who are begging him to just let the music play and leave it alone!). I say that the biggest theme of our friendship over the last decade has been "the unexpected." I didn't expect to marry a guy I met on my very first day of college. We got married with no plans to move overseas and settle down in Southeast Asia. And looking forward to the next decade...I have no idea what to expect, either, but I'm so humbly grateful for how amazing the past decade has been. This "unexpected" Angel makes my life even more exciting.
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Linking up...slightly late...with 10 on the 10th and with Celebration from #LoveBlog2018 !