Moving In...and Feng Shui

Someone told me that January 29 was a good day to move, according to the Feng Shui calendar. We're not Chinese, but I thought that it wouldn't hurt to target that day--since we needed a deadline anyway! Then someone told me that the best time to move was between 6 to 9 am. What?!?! How do I move into a house in 3 hours? Even if I started at 6 am (which the village association is NOT going to allow anyway) I will be moving things starting at the lucky hour, and then overlap into the unlucky hour, and probably end the move during a bad day!  This was all too confusing.

I was pacified when my cousin told me that it was just a "symbolic move", or just the start of the move, and the symbolic thing was to bring into the new house: a container of rice, salt, sugar and water, plus a religious symbol. I don't know if she just lumped  a whole bunch of Chinese/Filipino/Spanish beliefs together, but that's what I did.

The kids had to be in school at 7:15 am, so we left our old place at 6:30, dropped our  "moving symbols" in the new house, looked around a bit and then we were off to school. We definitely made our symbolic move within the luckiest hours of the luckiest day of the month. I was belatedly told that I should've included a container of coins too.

Soon this dusty, empty (there was still minor work going on in different parts of the house) house was going to be full of boxes and junk that I didn't have the time and energy to sort out before moving.

Now these "moving symbols" are all sitting on top of the upper cabinet, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to use them or if I'm supposed to keep them there forever. Maybe it should've been the first thing I consumed during my first days here? Who knows? Good thing were not Chinese, or Spanish, and we really don't believe in these things anyway.

Knowing an "auspicious date" got us to make that move, and that was the whole point anyway.

Moving Out!

We did it--we moved last January 29! I mean we started moving on January 29 and were in the new house on Feb. 1, a day before my birthday. I didn't know the act of moving was going to be so traumatic! I was freaking out when the movers were packing up MY things--and treating them like, well..THINGS!

I felt enormous sadness thinking-- this was our first home after getting married, this is where the kids were born, this is where they were babies, etc etc. Whaaaaaa!  I stayed in my room and cried for awhile.   I'll NEVER move again after this! I'm going to die in this "new" house.

It was hard the first two days, but as soon as the house didn't look like my place anymore, it was easy to just go with the flow and mechanically pack like everyone else was doing. I looked out one last time to the my view for the last 9 years..

Whenever there would be a "rally of 30,000 people", all I had to do was take a peek out my window and it would always only be a couple of thousand people, all "hakot", laughing, eating, taking pictures of each other!

It was also easy for me to assess the traffic situation and plan an alternate route before I left the building. One of the big advantages of living in a condo--NO mosquitos! I guess they can't fly that high.