Reading this week:

• Invisible Governance: The Art of African Micropolitics by David Hecht & Maliqalim Simone
• This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

I have named this blog post “Cate Café 3” because it is the third time I have been to a cat café. Frankly I have not gone nearly enough. For those that didn’t bother to click the last link, the first time I went to a cat café was in Singapore, the second time was in Washington DC, and the third time was in our very own New Haven.

The cat café here in town is called, appropriately, Mew Haven. They run on the DC model, where they partner with a shelter and you can adopt the cats, vice the Singapore model, where the cats were exclusive to the café and were featured on all the merchandise. I follow both Crumbs & Whiskers and Mew Haven on Facebook, and frankly Crumbs & Whiskers has much better photography. This led me to incorrectly believe that Mew Haven would be an inferior cat café experience, which was probably part of the reason that it took me a year and a half to get to the place. I could not have been more wrong in my impression! Mew Haven was great!

But first the getting there. I finally booked tickets for my girlfriend and I when I guess the unbearableness of not having a cat became too much, and also it was something to do to get out of the house and also I have been feeling like I should contribute more to my community in the monetary sense and the cat café is a good cause. It’s on the other side of town, so a scooch after lunch we piled into the DeLorean and set off. We had never been to that side of town and were surprised to discover a sweet little downtown area with a dance studio and a hip-looking coffee shop and a vintage store. Very nice!

They’ve got some COVID protocols in place, and so the sessions are only 50 minutes long, making me antsy to get in. But they had to process people so it took a few minutes, but all happened smoothly. And then we were in with the cats!

It was a really good cat café session. They had something like 17 cats all crammed into there, and a large number of those were kittens who were very playful. Unfortunately they don’t let you pick up the cats, in which case I would have tried to hold all of them at once, but it’s probably for the best. I entertained myself trying to get two cute little kittens to bother an adult cat who was trying to take a nap, while my super amazing girlfriend quickly found a friendly momma cat and dedicated a good chunk of time to petting her. I also found out on this excursion that my girlfriend has a particular for large cats, and there were some excellent chonkers to keep her quite happy.

I was sad that at the end of a very short 50 minutes our time with the cats had come to an end, and we had to shuffle out of there. The Mew Haven cat café is very well run and has excellent cats and I can’t recommend them highly enough if you just want to get more cats into your life. Someday, when the lease allows, I’ll just go ahead and get an in-home cat café, but until then I’m willing to outsource to Mew Haven.