It turns out that there is a brand new cat café right down the street from us, maybe a twenty minute walk. They are building an enormous and insane shopping complex (this is what they do in Bangkok) on Chan Road; it is still heavily under construction though they claimed it would open in December. The complex is named (in English) Vanilla Moon, and I cannot for the life of me imagine what that is meant to convey except perhaps a perfume ad.

But Vanilla Moon is not important. The only establishment in Vanilla Moon that is open is the cat café, which is named Cara Meow Cat Cafe. As you can tell from the name, it is Italian themed. It has a slogan, which is “All About ‘Meow'”. This makes slightly more sense than Vanilla Moon, so I won’t worry about it.

Since we are exciting people leading exciting lives, we went to visit Cara Meow on Saturday night. Well. The first thing about this cat café is that it’s in the basement, which maybe makes sense? The cats aren’t tempted by birds, as was the case at the other place. The second thing about this cat café is that it’s smaller and generally less splendid than the other cat café. It is extremely difficult to count up the number of cats they have at a cat café, but they seemed to have about a dozen, maybe half what they have at the other place. Also less cat paraphernalia but who cares about that.

What matters, of course, is the quality of the cats. The cats here are considerably less fluffy than the cats at the other place, being as they are mostly of the short-haired persuasion. Some are of the variety that have stubby ears. I was not sure about the pedigrees of the cats but I was assured they were very fancy indeed. I am not an expert. These cats did generally seem smaller. They were also a bit more skittish: probably because being cats at a cat café is new to them and it takes time to grow into the position. Harriet seemed reasonably pleased with them. There were not threats of thousand-baht fines for picking the cats up, which made me worry less.

The distinguishing feature of this cat café would appear to be that it allows you to bring your own cats. Wikipedia has nothing to say about this, but I expect if someone were to subscribe us to Cat Fancy we would learn that all the up and coming cat cafés are doing this. Some people brought in a pair of astonishing beasts. One was a gray long-haired cat who had been given a lion cut with a fluffy tail – I’m sure there’s a technical name for this haircut but I am not a cat groomer so I don’t know – and the other was white and with a roughly similar haircut, though it was wearing a Christmas sweater and may in fact have been a ferret. They appeared to get along with the other cats. I was not quite sure of the ethics of taking pictures of someone else’s cat in a cat café but here is a picture of one of them:

The cat in the foreground is one of the regular cats. And here is a picture of the rest of the cat café:

Also they serve Italian food because it is an Italian cat café. Harriet was extremely pleased with her spaghetti carbonara, which the cats did not appear to be interested in.