20 Beautiful Maine Coons

Before I forget, here are some pictures relevant to my last blog post.

Many food-milestones: first breakfast (veg omelet with tea, which made me overwhelmed with how good the tea is in Taiwan), first purchase in Mandarin (milk tea and... what I thought was green tea but apparently was some melon flavor), first dinner at a restaurant (noodles, tea-boiled egg, tofu).
         

And here are two pictures of Zheng Da, Andrew's neighborhood where I spent most of last summer.

The canal (the water level rises dramatically when it rains a lot)

His apartment building is the farthest on the left

I also took a few pictures of the street outside our apartment rental by the Daan metro station. The Taipei metro is almost always pleasant but the aboveground trains are the nicest part.

Surprisingly (for those of you who know my love for bubble tea), it took us a whole two days to buy some. During the very beginning of my trip, my jetlag manifested itself as me feeling sporadically woozy, so I didn't feel super up to inhaling a lot of caffeine and sugar.  But we finally did our job Yesterday and got this bubble-tea/ice cream float combination at 10pm.
                 

need more

The view outside our apartment at night is pretty nice, although there's a lot of noise from traffic. The garbage trucks come around 10:30pm.


Today was a very productive day. We got.... 2/3 of the way married? Andrew, his mom, and my family went to the American Institute in Taiwan to get a notarized affidavit of single status, then to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get that document authenticated.

The process sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare but it was actually very efficient (and, hopeless nerd that I am, I really enjoyed seeing other government buildings). Going to AIT freaked me out at first because someone mistakenly told us to try to go into the back entrance, and so we walked past the well-marked signs towards a sketchy concrete guardhouse door before being turned around. The security at AIT reminded me of an airport--they made us leave all our cell phones and electronic devices. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was in a pretty fancy building but the office itself looked eerily like the DMV. (It was the most crowded building I'd ever seen but also super fast, thanks in no small part to Andrew's mom who was able to tell me exactly what I needed to do.)

Tomorrow we'll be able to get our authenticated document from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and take it to the Household Registration Bureau... and then we'll officially be married! The plan was to do this all today (plus taking pictures), but the second government step takes 12 hours to process. And it was raining, despite weather.com steadfastly assuring me that it wouldn't rain .... but oh well. We got to do something equally exciting today, which was...

...see 20 Beautiful Maine Coons!!!!

Let me explain why I am typing like a hyped-up Chihuahua.

After we realized we would have to postpone the whole getting-married thing to tomorrow, my family got lunch and tried to figure out how else to spend the rest of the day. It was raining pretty consistently, which ruled out a lot of outdoor activities, but there was one must-see on our list that could be counted on, rain or shine: going to Cafe Dog and Cats, the World's Oldest Cat Cafe!

My mom, Tara, Andrew and I took the metro to Zhisan, excited to see Little Obedient and the rest of our nice cat friends.

But then, despair: the cafe was closed! We weren't sure if this was just for the day or some longer period of time, but this was The Worst News! We were very sad, and went to a little Italian cafe to order some hot chocolate to drown our sorrows (and get wifi to see if there were more cat cafes we could go to).

Luckily, the woman working there said she'd seen the cat cafe open earlier that week, so it probably was only closed for the day.

Andrew's #2 and #3 loves, fire emblem and chocolate
(his #1 love is cats)

We found a blog that started with the sentence: "Taiwan has 80 cat cafes, and I have nearly visited them all" and started going through the list. Located in Taichung? That's out. Only 3 cats? Nope. Only one cat? That's basically just a regular cafe, with a cat.

But then, oh joyous day, we spotted it: The Genki Cat Cafe. Just a few minutes away from Cafe Dog and Cats, our original destination, this cat cafe was home to "20 Beautiful Maine Coons."

TWENTY. MAINE COONS.

Now, I did not believe this. A cat cafe just a short walk from where we were moping about the (temporary) closure of out beloved cat cafe? 20 Maine Coons?!?!! Even 10 Maine Coons is too much for a mere mortal to handle.

But, we set off, and oh........... I was so, so, wrong. This cat cafe was the most magical place on earth. I know I said that about the last cat cafe I went to in Taipei but they can share the title. And, it did have 20 Maine Coons (though some of the cats were probably half-Maine Coon and half Scottish Fold.)

We had a hard time finding the cafe, because once we saw it was just six blocks away on the same street that the first cat cafe was on, we excitedly headed off in that direction without writing down the actual address. Andrew had called ahead before we left the Italian cafe to make sure they were open ("They didn't say they were the cat cafe, but I heard meowing in the background") and so six blocks later, when we realized we didn't know where it was, he called them back. We still doubled back a couple of times before finding it (sadly, it was very well marked with many large signs of cats).

This blog post is already really long (and my mom has the camera with all the cat pictures and she's gone to bed), so I'll make a separate one tomorrow for the pictures of our actual visit. (Sorry for deceiving you with promises of Maine Coons. I took very many, I promise.

Here is a picture of two very displeased cats on leashes Andrew found.

he said they yowled a lot

all in all, very very good day. very good. many cats.