World News for Students of English

26-07-2021 07:00

At the Gato Café in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, coffee and tea are served with whiskers and a purr.

Cat cafés were first popularized in Asia where they originated in Taiwan in 1998. Giovanna Molinaro, the founder of Gato Café, was inspired to create the café after a trip to Japan in 2018. However, Gato Café doesn’t offer just cat company, it also is an adoption site for abandoned cats rescued by an organization called ’Bunker Whiskers’. Customers purchase lattes dusted with cat silhouettes and accompanied by paw-shaped biscuits while cats lounge lazily in an adjacent room.

In 2019, there were over 78 million pet cats and dogs in Brazil. As owners passed away and families were thrown into disarray during the coronavirus pandemic, many animals were abandoned or left to look after themselves.

Difficult words: whiskers (long protecting hairs that grow near the mouth of a cat, mouse, or other mammal), purr (a quiet, continuous sound of a cat that the animal makes when pleased), silhouette (the dark shape or outline of something against a light background), disarray (a state of disorganization or mess).

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