Over the past couple of days there has been lots of media attention and long waits for those looking to get into the Purina One Cat Cafe in NYC. The cat cafe is the first of its kind in North America.  

When I first starting hearing about the NYC Cat Cafe it immediately brought back memories of a silly place that we visited a little over a year back while in St Petersburg, Russia.

Kim, Lucas and I headed to Russia for our holiday break in 2013 and visited Moscow (and St Petersburg).

While looking for things to do during the last day of our visit, Kim came across an odd site. She found the Cat Museum on TripAdvisor. We decided to fit it into our plans since it wasn’t really out of the way.

We didn’t really know what to expect when we decided to add the Cat Museum to our day’s activities. Whatever it would be, we were pretty sure that it would at least, be a good laugh and also figured that Lucas would like it.

When we got inside,  the Cat Museum looked like your typical cafe, it just happened to smell like cat piss! There were a bunch of tables filled with people drinking coffee, some also enjoying a snack. We also saw various cat related items for sale.

We asked about visiting the museum and were told that reservations were required. Oops… I said that we didn’t know and it ended up not being an issue. We paid the small admission fee, had to put plastic booties over our shoes and were led to a large wardrobe. (It reminded me of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.)

Kim, Lucas and I entered the wardrobe, closed the door and were told to repeat some magic words. We then were buzzed in to the other side and couldn’t believe what we saw.

The room was filled with lots of people and lots of cats. I’d guess that there had to be around 25 wandering around, sleeping and snuggling up to the visitors inside.

We immediately joined in the fun. Lucas was really curious about the cats and had a load of fun checking them out and petting them.

There is cat-related artwork hanging around the space but we didn’t really see any cat info. This cat museum didn’t seem to be much more than a cat petting zoo!

There was one other room with a coffee machine as well as a cat jungle gym. One of the staff then gave a short lecture, maybe this was the museum part- we have no clue since we don’t speak Russian!

The Cat Museum wasn’t exactly what we expected but it was a lot of fun and quite a change of pace from the sites we were visiting during the trip. It was pretty cool to see a wide variety of breeds of cats and it was also kid-friendly. I’d guess that 80% of the guests were there with a little one!

I’m not sure that I would recommend going out of your way to visit the Cat Museum but we found our visit to be well worth it!

Check out some more photos from our visit: