TravelChick

Cat Ladies

The five months I was living in Sha'alan, I didn't write about the cat ladies. As in most neighborhoods in Damascus, there are a swarm of stray cats in Sha'alan. The stray cats here are generally not cute. They're scraggly, dirty, and make horrible screeching mewls that sound like enormously unhappy babies.

For whatever reason, a few women in my neighborhood feed the cats on a regular basis. They come out sometime mid-morning and make little platters of gooey, slippery animal innards for the little felines. It's enormously disgusting to see the innards and to see the cats slurping them down. The cats seem happy, which I think sometimes diminishes my recoil upon seeing them eating.

I don't have a soft spot for cats eating chicken innards, but I do on occasion find the stray cats amusing. Just down the street from my apartment building is a bustling vegetable market. The past few months quite a few people have been selling fresh grape leaves and they'll often sit with their boxes of produce on my street, away from the noise of the market, to count and prepare their grape leaves.

One morning I was walking to school and saw two men sitting on the sidewalk, boxes of grape leaves surrounding them. They had stashed one box in a shady spot, and one of the stray cats was sitting regally on top of it. Between the regular feedings and the nice spots to laze around, the stray cats in Sha'alan have a pretty good life.

posted by Travel Chick @ 7:33 PM