Kittea Again!

I am sold on this place.

I do still love Cat Town Cafe in Oakland but this one is only a third of the distance from my house and while I love cats of all ages, it is funny getting to see all the kitten action. There are actually two in this photo.

Two little brothers wrestling each other all over the place. In fact this is one of them in an unusually still moment.

And this could be either one using me as an actual human shield.

And who knows which this is playing "catch the hand".

There were others too.

Some veeeeery relaxed.

So adorable!

Just when you think it can't get any better...look what I spotted on the way out!

That's my week accessorized.

Tea at KitTea

I am not a tea drinker. But were I to be one I would never go to any cafe except KitTea. It only opened a month or so ago and I finally got there at the weekend.

The cat cafe I had been visiting in Oakland is an hour each way including a 20 min walk from the metro when you get there. So although I love the set-up I was more than ready to get some cat time closer to home. I only booked 30 minutes since I wasn't sure if it would be any good but in future I'll definitely be going for the full hour. Even if you haven't booked a session with the cats, the cafe is very nice and has a huge picture window.

You get as much tea as you can drink during your booking plus there are cakes and things to be bought. When my time came I got to spend time with such a cute gang of guys and girls.

This tiny fellow came to sit next to my legs...

...and when I squatted down to stroke him he decided to take shelter underneath my derrière.

Then when I did sit down this little one came over and got straight into my lap.

He was heading off to his new adoptive family later that day as this is also a place where you can adopt the cats there. I would have loved to take them all home with me!

Filling Up On Cats

With my new job starting any minute now, I knew my visit to the Cat Town Cafe in Oakland last week might have to last me a little while. My visit started memorably when my Uber driver asked if it was ok if he came in with me to have a look since he was intrigued by the idea and had never heard of the area's speciality coffee house. He departed after grabbing a cup and I was left to enjoy the cats.

The sleeping guy above had the cutest pink nose and little black paw pads.

Is it bad to objectify cats like that? By commenting on their extremities? Meanwhile in the quiet room there was a lot of cuddling going on.

The little stripy guy above was adorable and stretched out so I could stroke his stomach as well. Then there was one cat who had just recently moved from the Shelter to the cafe who was still nervous.

He sat right at the back of the space so I slowly lent in to stroke him without spooking him. He wanted to be stroked and leaned in for it but then pulled back at the slightest noise. I really do think this place is amazing as some of the cats are feral and some have been in Shelters for years and this place gives them a chance to socialise and get used to interacting with people with a view to getting them adopted. And is it working?

Stone Cold Steve Austin would definitely be giving out a "Hell Yeah" in answer to that one (WWE reference). I long for the day when I can be one of the adopters!

Finished Objects Abound and Knitting Too

It is *so* good to have a sewing machine and space for fabric again. I have been using the one shoulder bag for 10 weeks now so I whipped up a new one this week.

I even used one of the new stitches on my sewing machine - an arrow - on the pocket flap.

The sewing machine itself (a Singer 7258) is rather noisy and not as smooth as my pre-Tokyo Brother but we are getting on very well nonetheless. The main fabric and several of the squares are from what I found at Scrap when I visited last week. I also used that for this little notebook cover using 1/2 inch hexagons.

I learnt from my previous notebook cover that the flaps need to be as wide as possible to stop the covers falling out.

All important shopping list and cafe/shop destinations noted there.

I was making many notes at the second knitting group I attended this week which was in the Haight. I don't know why but I always thought the T on the end was silent, but it's not.

The people there were really friendly and one of them is even a WWE fan! It was so cool to have a conversation about wrestling with someone other than myself! I also gave my ridiculously girly knitting an airing.

Isn't it obscene? The UK Knitting and Crochet Guild have an online challenge to knit something for a baby in March so I decided on something I would never normally knit and set out to make the most girly thing possible. It is using this free Drops pattern but I've changed the chart to reduce the long carries of yarn behind and I'm only using two colours.

Last night we went out for dinner with some friends and I wore my penultimate finished object of this post - the Crazy Stripes Tee.

I could not be any happier with the fit of this. The length is perfect, the negative ease is elegant without being nasty, the overall fit is great. The pattern was excellently written too in a large range of sizes - I can see myself knitting this again in different colours.

And then finally, I have started making a set of coasters, of which two are finished.

These are inspired entirely by Pins on Pinterest and also gave me the chance to try my sewing machine's blanket stitch function, which is very handy for raw edge appliqué. I only used it on the cat's stripes but it worked well so that opens up another avenue of sewing to be explored.

Plus Minus Cats

In Physics there is a symbol called "plus minus" (not anything greek or nothing) that looks like this:

When I was doing my degree I would use it daily - or maybe even hourly. In later life maybe not so much but probably still a few times a month. It is very handy to indicate a margin of error or, in other words, how wild an estimate you are making. In some ways it isn't suitable for this post because my Mum did definitely lose her cat this week.

Poor little Artemis (Arty for short) developed a flea allergy about two years ago and had to go onto steroids. The weight gain they caused may have robbed her of her svelt figure but she was still a champion hunter and was leaving impressively large entrails on my Mum's doorstep right up until a few days before she died. She used to love sleeping with her paw over her nose.

And she had terrible balance and could only get down out of trees if someone stood underneath and caught her.

On my farewell visit before coming to America I spent a lot of time with her on my lap with her doing this kind of inward snore, outward purr breathing while I stroked her soft fur. I'm really glad I did that.

The morning I got my Mum's email was the same morning I had booked my first visit to the Cat Town Cafe in Oakland. Oakland is where you end up if you follow the the Bay Bridge (not the Golden Gate one) out of San Francisco. Traditionally it has had a fairly rough reputation with lots of race violence and shootings but parts of it are now Shoreditch-esque in there inclusion of vegan coffee and bicycle shops. It is not like the previous cat cafes I had visited as all the cats there are up for adoption so some are only at the cafe a matter of days before they go to a new home. The cafe has rehoused more than 135 cats since October last year which is pretty phenomenal and one was being fostered while I was there.

The whole place is very clean and light with lots of places for the cats to sit or play. All the cat furniture represents aspects of Oakland or San Francisco.

This *beautiful* one was sleeping at the top of the Tribune Building.

While in another "Quiet Area" (max two people at a time and no toys) there was a little house.

Underneath this was a very quiet area where the cats could go if they were nervous. The ginger boy below had just got back from a patrol of the main room but the long-haired back one, called Mason (should have been 'Mow-son') was quite jumpy.

He loved being stroked though and completely stole my heart. Having just lost Arty and knowing that Mason didn't have a home with people who loved him made me pretty emotional. It was hard to say goodbye. I have mentioned him to Pooch but until we have sorted out some proper housing it's not really viable. Not really. Certainly not ideal. Probably not for the best. Not for the best. For the best. The best. The best thing that could ever happen.

Poor little Arty. She was a rescue cat herself. She was such a quirky little thing but so adorable.

A Delayed Visit to London's Only Cat Cafe

When I first heard about the crowdfunding campaign to get a cat cafe open in London I was all over it like a rash. I was so excited. I signed up and pledged my hard earned wonga and then sat back, eagerly awaiting the opening date. That was at the start of 2013, and shortly afterwards I found out I'd be moving to Japan which then finally happened in November of that year. I vaguely remember that the cat cafe was supposed to have opened by then but got held up by planning permission, so I was already in Tokyo and whooping it up in the cat cafes there by the time Lady Dinah's opened its doors.

In return for my funding I got a "Nine Lives Card" entitling me to a discount on the £6 or so cover charge for a 90 minute visit for my first nine visits. Saturday was my first! The staff were very friendly and I was seated at my own table downstairs.

There were cat perches everywhere and sure enough there were about five of the seven or so cats sleeping in different spots.

Some of these were accessible and some weren't. Before I went I had read one of their updates online saying that some people had been disappointed with the number of cats that were sleeping during their visit. I read that statement in the context of Tokyo's cat cafes and assumed the disappointment was due to the cats not running after profered toys or jumping into laps. What I hadn't realised was that you are not allowed to touch sleeping cats, even if they are sleeping right next to you. That basically meant that there were two cats to "go around" what turned out to be a really large number of people for the space. If the downstairs room was a cafe I would have described it as definitely full. Perhaps 20 people were down there? And half an hour after I got there - in what was the first "sitting" of the day - more people arrived and were seated at the tables upstairs in the play room. What quickly happened was that as soon as any of the awake cats did something (such as walk across the room) it was immediately surrounded by a little crowd.

The cat cafes in Tokyo and Seoul were never anywhere near this crowded and often I'd be the only one there for at least some of my visit.

On their website, Lady Dinah's talk about how some overseas cat cafes deprive cats of food so they beg customers for treats - something I never saw in Tokyo or Seoul - but at Lady Dinah's the cats instead were stimulated with some sort of powdered chicken treat. Initially this was done by staff but they then handed it to visitors so the cat in question would interact with them. This is what that looked like.

An even bigger crowd around the cat involved. If you were at the front of the crowd you got to pet the cat. Otherwise, you got to watch other people do it.

While I can understand that the thinking behind Lady Dinah's is all to protect the cats, I feel there might be a bit of anthropomorphism going on. If your own cat was asleep at home, you wouldn't fear upsetting its emotional balance by stroking it. And if the cat was peeved at being disturbed it would go and sleep somewhere else. The same thing used to happen in the Tokyo cafes I went to. Cats wishing for a good snooze would sleep up high.

Cats open to a bit of doze/tickle would stay low.

Afterall, these cafes are only open for about 8 hours a day so that leaves another 16 for undisturbed r+r.

On reflection I felt that if I had never been to any other cat cafes I would have been satisfied with the experience on offer at Lady Dinah's. In fact I felt the word "experience" summed it up pretty well. It is a "cat experience" and a cafe. It was only having experienced a "cat cafe" as they were originally intended to be that made the name a misnomer in this case. However, as the Knit Harlot once said when I asked her for her opinion about knitting needles on planes (at the time they were banned) "It's their plane so it's up to them to decide what can go on them." So it follows that this is their cafe and their cats (I forget who exactly 'they' are) so it's up to them to decide when you can stroke them. However, I won't be needing the other eight of my nine lives so if anyone in the UK would like the card let me know and I'll post it to you.

One thing about the cafe is its very interesting location - on Bethnal Green Road. This is a low income area of London, coincidentally where I was living when I met The Pooch. You will not find many other hipster places just here which, let's face it, is basically what Lady Dinah's is. Depending on the way you choose to walk you can end up walking through parts of Shoreditch which has been gentrified and is now full of hipsters wearing layers of grey, black and plaid. This means the graffiti, something I quietly admire in general, is a mix of traditional and modern. You get the more artsy stuff...

...on hoardings surrounding current building work while longer-term walls hiding waste ground get a more transitional treatment.

My personal favourite on this trip was this thuggish Peppa Pig amid a load of tags.

Having had to draw Peppa umpteen times for my ickle niece I admired this artist's work. That's assuming it is Peppa. For all I know it could be a Hipster Icon and Peppa is simply an ironic reworking of it. In which case I need to rewatch the "Muddy Puddles" episode and think in more depth about the subtext.

Seoul Part 1

I am back and almost not entirely caught up with what I've missed since I left on Wednesday. Who would have thought moving continent with no idea of where you'll be after 14th January would be so time consuming? My inbox resounds with the ping of those wanting to buy our secondhand rice cooker and take away our ironing board and meanwhile I still haven't managed to put SkipNorth on sale. So much to do...

It wasn't really the best time to go away but I had booked it some months ago and I may not be back in this part of the world for some years so I decided to head off. Seoul is quite similar to Tokyo in many ways but, to my eye, not as attractive.

It's also not as high rise, a lot smaller, plus it sits in a kind of valley with lots of impressive mountains in the distance.

On the attractiveness front, one can't really help thinking that it would have been nicer looking had they not been brutally invaded by the Japanese quite recently and invaded/burned/bombed to pieces on a fairly regular basis throughout history. There are still pockets though. Bukchon Hanok Village was about five mins walk from my initial hostel and was my first port of call.

I really liked the roofs and all the textures on the walls.

And some of the door trims were very beautiful.

I had heard about the Markets in Seoul before I left and headed first to Namdaemun which sold...everything?

There were stalls for seemingly everything clothing/footwear/household related and the market was vast. Look for the vanishing point in the photo below. And that is just one street in a vast rambling whole.

It really was massive. And quite seasonal.

The other shopping areas tended to have multiple shops all for the same things. In one instance there were three shops in a row all selling only face masks - seriously - whilst I found myself strolling through camera village.

Then I found what I wanted - a texting Garfield.

This was the sign that the cat cafe was near - yay!

This one just adored the male owner and followed him everywhere when she wasn't sat on his shoulder.

They were all very sweet.

And the place was nice too.

More adventures in Part 2...