La Chatte

Well, avid readers, I think its time to update you on the members of my homestay family.  First, we have Alain, my “dad,” a history professor who splits his time between Bordeaux and Paris, working for some kind of national professor’s syndicate or something.  Then, Guadalupe, my “mom,” raised in Texas, went to college at Whittier in LA, and moved to Paris for school many years ago.  She now teaches English to students of all ages in after-school or after-work classes, but is home most of the day (which is nice for me, because she usually offers me coffee when I get home!).  Balam is my ten-year-old “brother,” who attends middle school, enjoys bike riding, rugby, and plays an assortment of instruments… fairly unobnoxious for a ten-year-old.

 

Finally, the most important member of the family (and no, I’m not talking about myself), the cat.  Ayole.  The world’s smartest cat, and I am not exaggerating or using sarcasm here.  The thing is so stinking smart its unbelievable!  Try as I might, its always a step ahead of me, and if I try to get a step ahead of it, it usually threatens to bite me.

 

I will illustrate with several examples.

 

This first example requires some background information.  My room is Guadalupe’s daughter’s old room… and it’s her daughter’s cat.  The daughter is currently away at school in Germany, sometimes comes home for a long weekend (has yet to since I’ve been here), but the cat stayed here.  This means that the cat is conditioned to coming into my room and hanging out, scratching things, getting into bed, etc.  I have told the tale of the cat jumping into my bed and having to be scared out in a previous entry; I’ve also mentioned the shower invasion before.

 

Aside from repeatedly jumping on to the counter and opening my room door and the kitchen door to the garage, the cat also knows how to open my armoires.

 

Oh yes, my armoires.  Where I keep things like shoes and coats and nice shirts that do NOT need/want/desire cat hair all over them.  The first time this happened, I had left one of the doors open just a crack, so I figured that it had just kinda pushed on the door, which had then opened, and gone in there.  The second time, I heard a creak when I was standing in the hallway, ran into my room (one of my main activities is preventing cat hair from getting on my bed, so I was rather worried when I heard the door), and saw a tail disappear into the wardrobe.  I figured I must have left it open or barely closed again, and the cat had pushed its way in.  Yesterday, however, I learned just how smart the cat is.  I saw the cat come into my room, something that I’m now fine with, as long as it doesn’t make a move for the desk or the armchair (which acts as a stepping stone to my bed), and walk over to the wardrobe.  I then watched it use its little paws to paw open the door to the wardrobe (which doesn’t have a handle, you have to grab the little edge and pull) and, while I sat there in amazed stupor, crawl inside.  It doesn’t have opposable thumbs, for goodness sake!  How can it open doors?!

 

This weekend, my homestay family is gone.  Alain is in Paris for work, and Guadalupe joined him there Saturday afternoon, returning Monday evening.  Balam is at a friend’s house, so he has a way to go to school and such.  So it’s just me and the cat.  I decided that I was going to lock the cat in the garage last night… this is fairly common, since the cat can open the doors, and Guadalupe just locks it when she goes to bed, cat inside or not.  I fed the cats (there is a strictly outdoor one) and when Ayole went into the garage, I locked the door.  I could hear her try and open the door a couple times, but there was no way I was letting it back in to wreck terror and havoc on the house and get cat hair everywhere.  When I got up this morning, I went to open the door and let the cat in, only to have it run past me from the inside and go out. WTF?!  How did the cat get inside?!  Then I locked the door again, and went to take a shower.  The bathroom has a window in it that leads to the garage; it’s usually open when we take showers to act as a kind of ventilator for the steam and such.  The cat was sitting in the bathroom when I got out of my shower.  I then connected the dots: I didn’t leave the window open last night, the cat figured out it was there and pushed it open from the garage, so it could get back inside.  This theory was confirmed when I was brushing my teeth and it pushed the window open.  WAY TOO SMART.

 

At the moment, it is curled up looking all cutesy on my armchair… the thing has an innocent face and a mischievous face, I swear… life with la chatte is definitely interesting, that’s for sure!