Felis Cat Cafe and Ristorante: Dining with Felines

On Wednesday we headed to Utsunomiya to hit up a restaurant I had noticed while driving through a couple of weeks earlier. The sign is a giant picture of a cat’s face and the name is Felis: Cat Cafe and Ristorante. After we drove past I was left wondering: is this a cafe FOR cats, where they can meet their friends for a cocktail after a hard day of laying in a sunny spot on the carpet? Is it a cat-themed restaurant where all the cat trinkets you can think of adorn the walls? Or ::no it couldn’t be could it:: is cat on the menu?

When we got home that night a quick Google search led me to the Felis website and despite the very sketchy aut0-translation I came to understand that this is indeed a ristorante, specializing in Italian and Mediterranean food, and a cat shelter that promotes adoptions and foster homes for wayward cats. WHAT. THE. SHIT. Carbs and rescue animals, two of my favorite things.

While there are a few pics on the website of a cat sitting in the middle of a restaurant, it was all kind of ambiguous and my Americanized sense of health codes assumed that all the pretty kitties would be in some kind of special, cordoned off cat-living-space. Because…they’d have to be…right?

WRONG. Here’s me just after being seated at Felis:

Just beside our table…the lounge.
The view of the rest of the restaurant from our table:

Vesper, wearing a dog shirt at a cat cafe: great style and a strong sense of irony.

She seems to be thinking: I’ve got this stick with a string on it, why are all these cats running from me?!

That is a classic cat side-eye.

So where was I…cats, cats, cats are all over the place…OH YES, the food was amazing! I ordered a ginger ale with ACTUAL ginger. A spicy, carbonated, dream come true.

Dave had organic pork, mixed greens and rice after our soup and salad.

We had a spicy pasta primavera, but the baby would only eat if she could also clutch a cat toy.But I digress. Back to the cats.

After much discussion, we decided that if we were there to adopt a cat, we would choose the one pictured below for two reasons. 1) He has a mustache. So that’s obviously key. 2) He stealthily stole part of a peanut butter sandwich out of my bag (I’m always prepared for all scenarios) which shows a lot of gumption! We would name him Lanny McDonald.

It’s time to go home, but there’s a cat on our coats! Best. Restaurant. Ever.

Admittedly, a dining experience which is shared with animals isn’t for everyone. But we are some of most animal loving people you know who have very little concern for germs and no fear of pet hair. The place, however, was extremely clean and very well kept, naturally with some cat hair sprinkled around but NOT in the food! The service was AMAZING (in part because, BONUS OF THE DAY!, one of the staff is an American who could speak to us in English) and we left the whole experience on cloud nine. I’m happy to say we could open our wallets and loosen our belts all in the name of helping animals find a home.

When We Grow Up

I want us to be like this.

Candid shot taken by my sister while my parents were visiting her in Lillehammar, Norway earlier this month…and I hope she and Ryan are like this when they grow up too…

Music On Monday: Breakdown

First thing you should know is: I LOVE JACK JOHNSON. I do. I love every single song he sings. I know that’s not particularly cool or hip or interesting but sometimes music is good simply because it FEELS GOOD. In these days of hipster-mania it’s like you have to have discovered an artist busking on the street in order for them to be worthy of enjoying. Newsflash hipsters: popular music is popular, often, because it is fun, easy to listen to, and catchy. I’m not saying it’s the most interesting artistry, but I am saying liking it makes you a normal, loveable human being that enjoys enjoyment for the sake of the thing.

When I am in a bad mood or things aren’t going well, I often seek a musical pick me up. Dave will see me fumbling with the iPod and say ‘Jackie-J?’ (that’s what we call him, he likes it) and I’ll say ‘he can fix this.’ And he can. Anyone with a ukulele can solve my problems, that’s how small they are.

This week was pretty awful. Started with the baby falling ill on Monday, getting slightly better, getting much worse, and then finally getting slowly better again. I’m starting a fund where I collect all my loose change and pool it together for plane fare for one of our mothers should this ever happen again. Having a sick baby is exhausting. Plus we fell ill ourselves. Plus I don’t know what anyone is saying to me at the doctor’s office except for that one nurse who insinuated I wasn’t dressing my child warmly enough but don’t worry I killed her with a bunch of eye-daggers.

‘Breakdown’ is one of my favorite Jackie-J tunes and it fit well with our week. Sometimes we are forced to take things more slowly, to appreciate what we have, to try to chill the F out. I’m working on it.

M.O.M. Past:

Sarah Harmer

Timbaland ft. The Hives

Rene and Jeremy

Elvis Perkins in Dearland

Brendan Benson

The White Stripes

Janelle Monae

They Might Be Giants

Powderfinger

The Frames

Great Lake Swimmers

The Who

Andrew Bird

Cold War Kids

Michael Buble ft. Shania Twain

Butterfly Boucher

Hey Rosetta!/Said the Whale

Tracy Chapman

White Rabbits

Parenting Strategies of the Month

If the only thing a sick little baby will eat in 4 days is approximately 3 licks of a grape popsicle, you’ll be thanking the inventors of grape popsicle and seeing 3 licks as a huge victory.

Sometimes, I let her fend for herself. At this particular instance it was about an hour past bedtime so she was getting about one step shy of exhausted, but 5 seconds after I took this picture (instead of picking her up) another child distracted her she was fine. Baby steps to the real world, baby!

She has gained the ability to point at something she wants and say ‘THIS. THIS. THIS.’ until you give it to her. It’s annoying cute. She pointed at these crackers for 5 minutes while I said no. When I finally gave in changed my mind she just put them on the floor and enjoyed the sensation of stomping on them. While laughing. At me?

I let her walk down the road. OH MY GOD MOM CALM DOWN. I’m constantly inspired by the lack of ‘helicopter parenting’ in Japan. Is it really unreasonable to let her roam the side road we live on and explore our neighborhood while I am 3 feet away? The easiest way to get some fresh air is to just walk out our front door.I encourage learning a second language and she is trying to better communicate with her best friend Juno…but I don’t have the heart to tell her the book is upside down.

Two Men Having An Adult Conversation

Dave has a best friend. Let’s call him Matty since that is his real name.

They go way back to the time when they had some job parking cars together at the winter fair (whatever that means) and they bonded over jokes at the expense of their boss. Their friendship grew into a very rich relationship during which they slept head-to-foot in a single bed and wrestled each other to the point of actual physical injury in the name of fun. And that’s how best friends are made.

I met Matt only a few weeks after I met Dave in 2001 when red hats were all the rage. And they looked like this:

In the above photo Matty is sporting a pretty amazing gold chain and Dave still had all his original teeth. Those were the days.

Dave’s friends from home are really important to him. And his relationship with Matt is his biggest priority. But yet sometimes, I just don’t get it. I don’t get the logistics of the male-best-friend scenario.

My best friend, Jess, is basically like another version of me but with ideas I could never think of and better hair. When we talk it’s an endless string of chatter about this then that then something totally unrelated then back to the original thing. And we talk…a lot. We e-mail chains of conversations back and forth for days about baby names or recent medical discoveries or Etsy purchases. If I don’t hear from her for a week, I get all ‘WHERE IS SHE WHAT IS HAPPENING SEND OUT THE BAT SIGNAL!’

Dave and Matt don’t cherish communication quite as highly. Or maybe they are just WAY more efficient. They e-mail maybe a handful of times while we are away during the season. They chat once or twice on the phone, often at a time that has one person sitting 10 beers deep in one time zone while the other person was rudely awakened in their time zone.

For most of the past decade while I eavesdropped errrrrrrrrrrrrr what? overheard casually parts of their conversations it was mostly about hockey (how is your team doing Dave? how is ’Dub Dub’ Matt?) or another sport (something something Grey Cup, blah blah Tiger Woods) or a few tidbits of the most boring gossip from their hometown (so and so has lost it, so and so had a baby, so and so did such and such) or perhaps a brief moment where they both talk about their innermost hopes and dreams (the Jets returning to Winnipeg, dream fulfilled!). This short call is often punctuated with some profanity and a little friendly name-calling.

But these days, times have changed. Instead of forwarding each other e-mails with dirty jokes they are exchanging photos of their two beautiful daughters. Instead of wasting time on the somewhat ceremonial name-calling, they say some pretty awesome, lovely things about how they feel about parenting and fatherhood. Dave gives Matt tips on new music and Matt gives Dave ideas for his next shootout. They talk about their mutual friends, they ask about each other’s mothers.

And when Dave called Matt to check in over the holidays I was NOT eavesdropping but heard a conversation that sounded almost nothing like the two boys I once knew and a lot like two men with a really great friendship. Asking about family and talking about health scares and catching up on the milestones of their girls. Talking about plans for a vacation together, WITH our families, and looking forward to when they can teach their daughters to golf. Also, they did still talk about hockey and the Jets a fair bit.

All those years they stayed close over small talk and sporadic contact and my excessively needy self couldn’t understand how a friendship is sustained like that. And yet there they were, two men having an adult conversation.

And here they are two men holding beers, pushing strollers.

The Best Part of the Worst Day

Today was the day my little baby got the stomach flu. It was the first time I have EVER seen her throw-up. This fact is amazing considering she is 14 months old but it also left me emotionally unprepared for the shock of such a sight. And before today I had never seen ANYONE projectile vomit, but I can assure you that is a real phenomenon. Enough about that.

So today we went into survival mode. She didn’t want to eat but was keen to nurse off and on all day. She didn’t want to play. Or even watch hockey highlights. Mostly, she just wanted to lay her head on her mom and make tiny, sad, moaning sounds.

The bright spot of this rather unhappy day is that one of my dreams finally came true: I had a nap with my baby. I know the thing to do these days in North America is send your kids off to their own bed as young as possible and never let them in your sacred mattress area ever again (although a very informal survey of my friends seems to indicate that most people LET ON that they have such rules, but actually find themselves in an occasional if not regular kids-all-up-in-the-bed situation…and they are totally fine with it).

We however, have never had to banish this little lady to her crib because she did that herself. Around 4 months she just stopped WANTING to cuddle while sleeping. It’s a blessing, I know, in that we have a long peaceful night without a toddler snoring between us…but sometimes we just want to CUDDLE her. And sleep together. And we TRY to make her co-sleep, we coax her and keep our eyes closed and make shushing noises but she just continues to pound on our faces or say ‘Hi Dad. Hi Dad. Hi. HI. HIIIIII’ until we take her to her own room where she lays in her bed, rolls over, and goes to sleep. Very convenient and yet quite heartbreaking.

Today, however, her exhaustion and her discomfort led to her take solace in my arms, to rest in our bed, to cuddle between pukes. I’ll cherish that moment forever and be grateful that Dave had the sense to take a picture.

Music on Monday: Percussion Gun

I’ve been running more lately. And hard. The kind of run where at the end you fist-pump and yell out TAKE THAT MOTHER-TRUCKERS! My neighbors probably don’t like it but they’re certainly not going to approach the crazy foreigner and ask me to stop.

When I get to like the 42 minute 17 second mark of my run, I start to feel like dying. It’s a brief, roughly 3 minute sputter that, if I can get through, leads to a very, very strong finish. Which is where ‘Percussion Gun’ comes in.

Firstly, don’t you love when a lead singer plays an instrument other than the guitar? Me too. Secondly, if this song doesn’t make you want to sprint and/or jump-kick, you need to be examined because you are dead inside.

M.O.M. Past:

Sarah Harmer

Timbaland ft. The Hives

Rene and Jeremy

Elvis Perkins in Dearland

Brendan Benson

The White Stripes

Janelle Monae

They Might Be Giants

Powderfinger

The Frames

Great Lake Swimmers

The Who

Andrew Bird

Cold War Kids

Michael Buble ft. Shania Twain

Butterfly Boucher

Hey Rosetta!/Said the Whale

Tracy Chapman

March 28, 2012

Maybe it’s the more isolated nature of my life in Japan than in previous expat experiences, maybe spending this many months without my dogs wasn’t a great idea, maybe having a baby changed me, maybe I have a compulsive desire to mark things on calendars. But starting New Year’s Day I took the black pen to this free (I think it was free…I couldn’t read the sign) calendar I picked up at the bank and we are steadily making our way to the golden day of all days of the year, March 28, 2012.

Mall Rats

The best part of hockey life by far is the amount of free time Dave has to spend with the family. Compared to the schedule in North America the travel over here is a breeze and the games are seemingly few and far between. Every day after Dave gets home we eat lunch, put the baby down for her nap and ask ourselves ‘what should we do today?’

We go for walks. We go to the park. We take the baby to playgroup. We visit waterfalls or shrines. We soak in the onsen or make strategically planned trips to the grocery store. And sometimes, now that the baby is a walking, running, crazy woman, we drive to Utsunomiya, a nearby city much larger than Nikko, and walk around the mall.

At home this would NEVER be an activity of choice for Dave and me. We like to buy the odd thing here and there, but we’re not serious shoppers. We love going for walks, but something about the mall makes our backs hurt. But when the wind comes down especially hard off the mountains making it too chilly to have the baby outside for long periods and we just can’t stand to spend another minute in the small box of our apartment, the mall is an easy place to let her roam free without the constraints of a snowsuit or the dangers of traffic. Plus they have a Starbucks for mama.

This past Thursday we took such a trip. Highlights included:

Baby’s first Starbucks! At home I don’t a) drink coffee or b) go to Starbucks but when home seems so far away there is something about a mocha that makes it all better. Baby had a chilled hot cocoa and loved it because she’s no fool.

A new-found love of trains…the only thing that could prompt her to drop that stuffed dog was this section of the toy store.

Teaching her father how to play trains.

Repeatedly charging at the mirror, probably much the the annoyance of whomever’s job it is to Windex.

Darting in and out between clothes racks in the boutiques, making many salesgirls laugh and say ‘kawaiiiiiiiiiiiii’ while secretly hoping she takes her grubby mitts to someone else’s shop.

It’s the little victories! Finally found the almond-soy milk blend I’ve been scouring the Earth for!
One of my favorite guilty pleasures in Japan, yakisoba for dinner. Cheap, delicious, and really really really really delicious. Did I mention it’s delicious?

The Phone Knows

Yesterday afternoon as Dave and I settled into our own private mind-spaces while the baby napped, his cell phone started making some kind of ungodly siren/buzzing/beeping noise.

We both kind of looked around frantically like ‘What the shiz?! Where is it? What is it?’ And while any sound that urgent is probably designed to make people feel alert and alarmed, we were mostly panicking that this blasted noise was going to wake the baby from her nap.

Me: ‘It’s your phone!’

Dave: ‘Oh right! :::grabs phone::: Earthquake warning!!!!!!!!!!!’

Me: ‘Huh?’

Dave: :::running down the hall to the baby’s room while the apartment starts rumbling and I’m still pondering whether it’s worth waking her from her nap:::

And then it ended and she went back to sleep and all was right with the world.

Cats can see ghosts, dogs can smell cancer and now phones can predict earthquakes. What will they think of next!?