A Village-sized Cat Cafe

 

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Houtong Cat Village is a tourist destination in Taiwan that is essentially a village-sized outdoor cat cafe. Once a mining village, they’ve since switched over to attracting tourists with the alluring promise of wandering cats and picturesque scenery. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the cats were all sweet and well-treated…which is better than some cat cafes. They’re stray cats that the entire village takes responsibility of. So are they still strays? It’s complicated, but the whole system seems to really work well.

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Anime Pilgrimage: Jiufen (Spirited Away)

 


spirited-away-disneyscreencaps.com-1356Anime pilgrimages entail visiting locations that were used as references for certain scenes in anime. For example, Durarara!! proudly states that it is set in Ikebukuro, so you will see many landmarks throughout the series of this entire area. Just setting foot in Ikebukuro is entering the world of Durarara!! – no effort required. In the case of Kimi no Na Wa, the stairs shown in one of the more climactic scenes is the most popular pilgrimage site for the movie, which requires a little more effort to find this one particular spot. I found a few of the former, broad locations while I was wandering around Japan, which was quite easy since I just had to stroll around places like Ikebukuro, Shibuya (the crossing is in like every anime), and Enoshima.

In this post, I go out of my way to take a 1.5 hour train plus bus ride to a small town called Jiufen in Taiwan. This is the place that Hayao Miyazaki based Spirited Away on.

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