Admiration of Coffee & Cats

I am considering calling Korea—Seoul at least—The Land of the Morning Caffeine. I have never seen streets so densely packed with densely packed cafés and bakeries featuring coffee. And many, naturally, have a theme, to try to stand out in the tidal wave. Paris Baguette and Paris Croissant offer pastries galore, Dream of Coffee gorgeous flowers and butterflies embossed on the floor, Zoo Café a giant stuffed giraffe grinning in the doorway.

Take Urban, with its wide windows in a massive, honeycombed building has an all-you can eat bread buffet complete with an ever-slicing young woman in baker’s garb thrusting select pieces of pretzel bread and fluffy white onto your plate.

Latte King has a cool cartoon cat, who counsels: If you like coffee, why not try: More coffee, Stronger coffee, Drink coffee every day. Holly’s Coffee with its cozy fireplace brick and decadent mint or sweet potato lattes. Nuts’ Dogs café, heaven knows.

A paean to contemporary Korea I saw posted somewhere:

Admiration of coffee,
It’s blacker demon,
Like the hell it’s hot
Like the angel being pure
And like love it’s sweet.

Needless to say, it was hard to avoid these places, even for a predominantly tea-tippler like me. Luckily, I have a social coffee drinking side.

Another thing about Korean cafés, they seem to be predominantly populated by women, something like 3:1. I asked a friend about this, and she speculated men might be in bars, or might only be willing to be dragged to well-lit study places like cafés by their girlfriends and more appealing classmates.

Gangnam in general is crawling with students, especially female ones. Maybe the Korean male, or men in general, will be changed by this educated, caffeinated influence? It truly seems to be Girls’ Generation in Seoul.

One morning I left Teheran-ro for the backstreets of Gangnam en route to a school where I was spending my vacation. I noticed a silhouetted cat on a sign, bidding go up to the fourth floor’s cat (“koyangi” in Korean) café. I went up, it was early yet, and there I was, in a waiting room for some sort of clinic (which later turned out to be a plastic surgery place, possibly, as it was populated by young women in a kind of uniform, hosting un-uniformed young female visitors and taking them to back rooms with a camera in hand for what I assumed were “before” photos). The cat café was closed, but I returned late afternoon.

When I arrived, a young man met me and bid me apply hand sanitizer to my hands. Cat safety first! Another young man presented me with a rules sheet in English, and I nodded and smiled, agreeing to not poke the cats with my straw, let sleeping cats lie, etc. I was really impressed by their attention to detail!

I put on the provided slippers and stepped inside, where I could pay the 8,000 won fee and receive a drink in exchange, plus unlimited time with cats! For some reason, I had brought something to do with me, and actually sat with my drink, amid a bevy of young women clientele, sorting through some paperwork.

As I glanced around, it looked to be the after-school crowd, with girls in their late teens and twenties making me feel a bit out of place. At one point, a café employee bid me replace the plastic top on my cup of tea for lest ambient cat hair drift inside. One black cat, a Maine Coon(?) looked like our old cat Ben, and sat in the chair in front of me, just hanging out and smiling.

The various groups of girls, and some solo ones, were tempting cats with string and toys, and the café owner came by at a few points, providing us with bits of catnip to rub on our hands, vitamin paste for them to lick from our fingers, and, most popular with the cat set, chunks of juicy, white chicken which sent the cats sprawling and climbing on people’s shoulders, including mine, as one sought to get a better view of that corner of the room. Another had leapt up onto a girl’s shoulders (she was offering chicken at the time), so I gently lifted him off her as she struggled with the hungry crowd.

I got up and roamed the room a bit, and found pictures of each cat, with their name and a date—presumably the date the cat had come to the café, likely rescued from being a stray. These were adult cats, most looked similar to American ones, although some had more compressed faces I hadn’t seen before. There was a tiny, squeaky one of these that demanded and caught a lot of attention as she scrambled around making marvelous leaps and jockeying for position at the water bowl and feeding frenzies.

This is just a wonderful idea, giving cats homes, and letting people hang out with the cats for a fairly modest fee, probably exposing many young people who have never had pets to these lovely, companionable animals. There also cafés like this in Japan, I have since learned. When I return to Seoul, I’ll likely go again, but will try to bring a female or two to feel a bit more at home while participating in the feline festivities!