With our feline friends

 

On last Sunday, just before our ritual of culinary tourism over weekend, we went to Leo’s favorite cat café, Savannah Coshca, which is home to almost 20 adult cats and kittens. Although this is the place for Leo, I also enjoyed much because cats have been one of my best animal friends. 

The cat with dark fur in the first photo goes by dark cloud and the cat in the second photo is Deoku who is indeed pussycat loving sleeping in customers arms and on pet furniture. Leo bought two chicken breast packs for pets and fed flocking feline friends with pleasure. Their feeding frenzy, some savannah cats even jumped in an attempt to catch bowl containing breasts. As a matter of fact, me and Leo are allergic to furs of animals as well as pollens thus we sometimes sneezed and having runny nose.  But such problems never stopped enthusiastic cat lovers like us go there!

I remember that, especially on chilly, snowy days, cats provided both warmth better than blankets and brought sense of peaceful coziness with their purring. Once, I kept a fat, black cat named Bangho and a regularly visiting stray cat named Puksuke. I always kept extra tuna cans and bottles of clean water for my guest for her need and Puksuke seemed to appreciate what I did for.  In expression of affection for me, puksuke rubbed against my chest and stayed overnight with loud purring, which was the lullaby, making me fall asleep in a second.    

After feeding them enough, we felt hungry and decided to go to one of our best seafood restaurants which is just cross the street from cat café. There, we ordered steamed shellfish made with scallops, pen shell, various cockles, mussels, shrimps, winter mushrooms and essential element of Korean seafood broth, crown daisy. The role of the crown daisy, which is also called edible chrysanthemum makes soup savorer and actually many Korean soup dishes have it. Leo usually loves steamed scallops, but not pen shells because muscle hinges of pen shells are rather tough for kids. But I love them and spring is about the most delicious season spanning April to May.  Their habitats were restricted to west coastal areas of Korea, but, for some reasons, these days, it is possible to catch them in the east coast too. I also heard that most of shark attacks took place in Korea were related to fishermen going deep into the sea to collect pen shells. May actually overlaps with the time white sharks ride on turbulent stream to come to near coast and both the sounds of fishermen’s tools and smells of shellfish are known to attract them. Whenever shark warnings are issued, professionals are terrified, giving up fishing pen shells in their desperation. Next, we went to fried and roasted chicken place because Leo didn’t have enough and still was hungry. We had fried chicken with no seasoning on it. As wide spread trends associated with current whiskey boom in Korea, this chicken place also has highball menus.  In this place, we had two options and I chose Chosun highball, which seemed to be OK, however, I did not ask what kind of distilled sprit they used to make it.