Coffee and the Comfort of Cats

One of the most difficult things about leaving behind everything to come to Korea for a year was having to find a temporary home for my cats. They are my children, and I even travelled from Georgia to Minnesota to make sure they would have a good home and be well taken care of. I miss them, and there are days I wish I would come home and have them run up to me like they did back home. Instead, I come home to an empty apartment.

Cat Cafe: Gio Cat

Yesterday, I was invited to a cat cafe. I couldn't help but wonder exactly what that meant. Was the decor all cats? Was it just an interesting name? Was the food... well, cat?

To my surprise, it was a neat little place that serves coffee and lets you pet and play with cats. There were about 20 cats walking around, sleeping in large cat stands, or laying in customer's laps. Aside from the cat smell (which naturally would be lingering with that many cats), it was quiet, clean and a really interesting place.

Before entering you are required to take off your shoes and change into slippers, use hand sanitizer and then store coats and bags in a locker. They give a list of "rules" and a chart with each of the cats names and traits. You are required to order one thing from the menu, so naturally I got a White Chocolate Mocha. Mmmmm.

Then, you can either sit and enjoy your coffee and wait to see if any of the cats want to use your lap as a sleeping bag, or you can be procactive and sit right in the middle of things. I wanted to see if any cats would come to me... so I went to where the action was at.

Well, supposedly, my new laundry technique (the smell test-- if it still smells relatively good it doesn't need to be washed yet) isn't working as well as I thought because majority of the time I looked like this.

Yes, this is me sad faced with no cats in my lap. Everyone else had at least one cat come up to them and crawl in his or her lap to sleep and be petted, but not me. I think secretly they knew they could never replace Chaisey and Tommy... but boy did this make me miss them even more! Stupid cats. Eventually I was handed a pity cat... he didn't really want to be in my lap but then found he liked my necklace a bit so he stayed.

These two cats were a couple of my favorite. I love love love this first one and the smaller grey one was just too darn cute.

Research...

I did some research and found out that the owner originally wanted to run a cat adoption business. He wanted people to be able to come experience the cats before choosing to adopt them in order to understand what they would require and learn how to take care of them. His goal was to lower the amount of cat abandonments due to people not knowing enough about cats.

Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway...

If you're in Seoul and miss your pet, you should check it out. The cats seem to be happy and healthy and the atmosphere in the care give off a nice chill vibe.

And at the end of the day (or if they get sick of people) the cats just walk throught he giant cat mouth into the cat hotel.

“In order to keep a true perspective of one's importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.”