Cats and Dresses: Korea’s Weird and Fun Cafes

I feel like I abandoned my baby in the woods and left it to be swallowed up by the vines of hungry vegetation. The baby being my blog, of course, and the forest being the metaphorical great internet abyss. My life has been so insanely busy lately that I sometimes wake up in the morning and wonder how on earth I’m going to physically and mentally survive the day; but somehow my head always eventually drops into the pillow, swimming with exhaustion, until I wake up in the morning and do it all again. While most of the chaos has been from a 50-60 hour work week schedule, I’ve also managed to squeeze in some fun time and I have so much to tell you about! Korea is as weird, hilarious, aggravating, beautiful, and intense as ever and I’ve finally found some time to get back to blogging and share my stories.

 

 

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I’ll come right out and say it: I am a crazy cat lady. Maybe not as much as one of my best friends who delights in cat calendars and excessive kitten memes (perhaps that’s what makes us kindred spirits), but considering my grandmother used to have over 20 cats and wore those hand knitted cat sweaters, suffice it to say it’s in my genes.

 

When I first heard of Korean cat cafes, I was both confused and horrified. “They don’t… eat the cats, do they?!” I envisioned some kind of buffet with little signs touting the health benefits of each kind of cat. Calicos: tender and great for immune support. Siamese: known to increase virility!

It turns out a cat cafe is a coffee shop in which you buy an overpriced beverage for the privilege of hanging out in a room filled with jaded felines. Nevertheless, I was excited to get my fill of furry cuddles so my friends and I headed to the Cat Cafe in downtown Daegu.

I was not entirely impressed, as many of the cats smelled and most of them had weepy eyes indicating they weren’t in the best of health. Because the cats are so overloaded with attention, they generally just slept and ignored us–until we bought some treats to give them; at that point it turned into an all out feeding frenzy akin to sprinkling seeds to a flock of pigeons.

Even so, I have to admit it was nice to force my affection onto some kitties even just for a few minutes.

The next day we decided to continue our cafe adventures and went to the local dress up cafe. It’s not so much a cafe as just a photo studio where you pay to borrow a dress and prance around in it taking photos.

You browse through a book of dresses, each priced from about $15-25 and select one. The staff helps you dress in a changing room and then you are left to your own devices. We were a bit disappointed as we thought they would be have nice cameras and be able to take pictures of us, but we wound up just having to use our phones and a point and shoot. And considering it’s a place meant for taking photos the overhead fluorescent lighting is pretty terrible. But all in all it was pretty awesome, and oh-so-Korean!

 

 

 

Dress Cafe Info: