Visiting Kit Tea, a San Francisco Cat Cafe. See also: Excuse to post cat pictures.

A few months ago, a friend of mine and I went to Kit Tea, an Oakland cat cafe. I took a bunch of pictures, but I am only posting them now, because I am me.

I had never been to a cat cafe before, but of course I had read about them because I A) live on the internet, and B) like cats. It seemed like a good lark for a weekday afternoon.

When we came in, we saw the following wall mural:

…which I stared at for a bit because while I quite like hairless cats, and I am terribly amused by the conjunction of cats and yoga, somehow adding these things together broke my brain. (Also, it seemed like possibly uncomfortable appropriation, but I may be reading too much there.)

Inside the cat cafe, we discovered that just in case the flesh and blood cats were insufficient, there were lots of cat objects to compensate:

I didn’t open the Cat-opoly to see what was inside, but I suppose it’s quite possible that I could have spent the time we paid to get into the cat room playing cat monopoly instead. On the other hand, if the cats at KitTea are anything like the cats in Chez Swirsky, they would have made short work of the game by scattering everything and then plopping down on the board.

There were also some cat toys that I’m surprised to find I didn’t photograph, such as Tetris scratching posts, and a giant cat-hamster wheel.

The cats themselves were pretty lackadaisical. It was the evening and they had been accepting the petting of strangers with good grace all day so they were tired. Also, they were cats, so they were tired.

This dilute tortoiseshell did decide she wanted human company, jumping straight onto someone’s lap and subsequently refusing to move:

This brown tabby was happy to let people pet him as long as they didn’t expect him to get up:

This gorgeous orange fluffball spent most of his time hanging out on wall-mounted shelves, but eventually came down and sat by my friend and me. Periodically, he accepted head and shoulder petting.

I don’t think this orange and white tabby ever came down, though.

There were other cats, and I petted some of them, but either I decided I didn’t want to take pictures of them, or the photos were so bad I’ve blocked them out. But there were other soft, purring creatures about.

I like the wall-mounted cat furniture. When we move, I want to get a bunch of it, so that our five cats have more room to roam and aren’t argh just on us all the time Jesus Christ cat why don’t you stop standing on my chest

A cat cafe is to some extent wasted on someone who has five cats. When I want to pet a cat, I pet a cat. When I want to pet a bunch of cats, I pet a bunch of cats. When I want to see cats interacting, I toss Pete at his nephew or his brother, and they adorably groom each other. When I want to see a cat playing, one is always in the mood. And my cats are always excited to see me since I’m not a stranger.

It’s still totally worth it to poke around a cat cafe if you are cat-deprived in your life, or merely suffering from the slight cat deprivation that results when one has less than five cats. (Five cats. Headdesk.) And ESPECIALLY if you are thinking of adopting a cat because the cats at Kit Tea are looking for homes.