You have not lived until you have been to a cat café. I visited one in Seoul in February 2013, on a trip to Korea to visit my daughter, who was teaching English there. While the concept originated in Taiwan in the late 90’s, it expanded to Japan and became hugely popular there. Reportedly (translation: “the internet says”), a cat café is scheduled to open in London in the spring of 2013. Until then, I can say from personal experience that Korea is holding the line with great enthusiasm.
What you might experience at a cat café: cats everywhere, kittens, Siamese, Persian, tuxedo, mixed, smushed faces, pointed faces, one hairless cat in a cage, cats running frolicking, sleeping, eating, performing their toilette, sitting on your table while you have coffee, gathering around you if you have a bowl of cat food to feed them and cats generally just being adorable beyond belief. All of the young Korean women take selfies with the cats faces right next to theirs. (If you don’t know what a selfie is, watch what any girl anywhere in the world between the ages of 10 and 30 does with a camera—model poses with the camera held at arms length, endlessly snapping shots, how could the digital age not have gone there?) I don’t have a picture of anyone snapping a selfie in the cat café, but thankfully I do have one from the dog café in Busan (second largest city in South Korea):
The cat café in Seoul is $8 per person and you get a cup of coffee or tea or a scoop of ice cream and all the time you want with the cats. There was only a hint of odor, far less than the dog café in Busan, and the cats were very clean, except the greeter neglected to give us a plastic bag as we came in and a cat started to pee on my daughter’s coat. The staff cleaned her coat and gave us a bag and all was well. We played with the cats for well over an hour; it was so much fun. A Korean girl next to us gave my daughter part of a bowl of cat food and all the cats came running to be fed.
It’s so nice to be in a place where nobody freaks out about the liability issues and you can do some unusual things that might be a tiny bit risky. Everything seemed to go just fine, even when a family came in with their young children. The cats have claws and there was the occasional hiss between some of the younger ones, but there were no major incidents involving animals or humans. We in the U.S. could learn a thing or two. It’s not that Korea is not patriarchal, it is, in many ways far more so than the U.S. Just not litigious to a fault. Until that changes, if you are a cat lover, or just like to see curious things, the next time you are abroad, check for a cat café at your destination.
2 Responses to The Cat Cafe