We have now had over a week to adjust to living with our new kittens. When we visited the breeder, we noticed that the kittens did not like to be held, hid as soon as they were placed on the floor, and that the mother cat hissed when approached. It seems that the breeder did not handle or socialise her kittens at all, which meant that we have had to start from scratch.

At the beginning of the week, the kittens would hiss at us and flee whenever we approached. They spent all their time hiding underneath the filing cabinet or inside the mop bucket. They would not eat in front of us, and would only come out at night.

After a week of attention, they will now creep out from underneath the couches and approach us to eat or to play with a toy on a wire. They are still terrified of human hands, and will hiss and back away if any fingers come close. Every day they are getting braver, but it is going to take them a long time to learn that hands bring joy and not distress. Still, they are already a delight to watch. When they are sleepy they curl up with each other, and when they are playful they chase each other around the room, and up and down the cat tree.

Pepper is the darker, sleeker and larger of the two sisters. She is generally braver, and spends most of her time watching us from the top of the cat tree. She can manage to get up, but she has difficulties climbing down again, and once even fell on her head. She really likes to play, and to catch toys that are dangled up in the air.

Mint is lighter, smaller, and fluffier – the runt of the litter. She has a rounded face with big eyes that often look surprised and alarmed. She is constantly finding new hiding places and I never know where I am going to find her. She is the more agile of the two, and may sometimes run after toys if we move them across the floor. Despite her cautious nature, she is usually the first one to the food in the mornings.

Over the weekend we brought home our little 12-week-old Chartreux kittens. Two sisters, although one is darker with pale tabby stripes, and the other is a lighter grey. They are still very timid, and spent most of the weekend hiding underneath the filing cabinet. They will now eat in front of me (they go crazy for sachets of Hill’s tender tuna), and nervously sniff us, but are still very shy. At night we hear them exploring the apartment, and this morning I saw one of them on the cat tree before I scared her off.

Names? The shortlist is getting shorter, but no final decisions yet.

Even though Adrian would love a couple of Saint Bernards or Dachshunds he has compromised by giving me exactly what I want – two little kittens. I am super excited. I now have four large boxes from the ever-generous Internet that contain all the food and equipment to make our house cat friendly, including a kitty back-pack to bring them home on the train. As they will be living on the 11th floor, they will not have access to any actual trees, but I hope that this structure will suffice:

Image from zooplus

I am in contact with a Chartreux breeder near Charleroi using Google Translate as my intermediary. If Google is correct, the breeder has two female kittens who are currently nine weeks old, and we can go and pick them up in three weeks and bring them home. I may be visiting them this weekend to make my reservation. So now Adrian and I are currently working on potential cat names. He has vetoed names derived from television or movies, and technically Chartreux kittens born in 2009 should start their names with ‘E’. The naming of cats is a difficult matter. This is my current list:

Blauwe Kat and Kattebelletje
Pepper and Mint
Socks and Mittens
Misha-Penguin and Misha-non-Penguin
Hopscotch and Peppermint Whiskers
Moppet and Mittens
Smudge and Sage
Pickles and Pattycakes
Dot and Dash
Hocus and Pocus
Buttercup and Daisy
Midge and Middles
Medley and Mopsy
Bubbles and Buttons
Puddles and Pumpkin
Stardust and Teapot

We haven’t seen our little ones yet, but they should look something like this:

Images from annonces-animalieres

This trip was my first chance to sail amongst icebergs, in the Jokulsarlon lagoon. As the salty sea water reaches Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest glacier, hundred of icebergs break off where they slowly melt as they progress towards the ocean. It is a really beautiful and surreal place. With the glacier and snow-capped mountains in the background, most of the shapes are carved out in shades of blue – from the pale turquise of the ice to the vibrant azure of the sky. Streaks of black from centuries of volcanic eruptions cut through the vista to emphasise the age of this place.

We took a cruise through the lagoon and our guide carved off a sliver from one of the icebergs, so that we could eat ice that was over 1000 years old. Our guide was a native Icelander who spends all her winters in Australia – she even went to college in my hometown of Canberra. She spoke like a perfect Australian native, which made it all the more shocking to hear her correctly pronounce towns like Þorlákshöfn when talking about the region.

Occasionally, seals would poke their heads out of the water. Our guide told us that there were two types of seals in Iceland, and that these are the cuter ones, as they are smaller and have fewer whiskers. We were later told that the locals call the seals that give birth on land Land Seals, and the ones that give birth out at sea Out There Seals. The Icelanders are big fans of literal names for creatures and places.