Mapo-gu

One of the most important things that you can do when traveling alone is to try to keep yourself from getting injured. This seems like common knowledge, but it really does take extra effort to remember to protect yourself when you don’t have a companion to help look out for your well-being. When I am by myself traveling, I especially try to do whatever I can to not end up in the hospital, but there was one time when I came very close to needing to go to an emergency room. While in Seoul, South Korea in 2019, I visited a meerkat café, which didn’t actually serve any human beverages that I recall (or at least I didn’t purchase one) but did have meerkats, foxes, wallabies, raccoons and other furry creatures.

Before getting to enter the meerkat petting area, which was a 3 ft walled-off enclosure with padded floors, a cafe staff member warned us that the meerkats would try to scratch our faces and that we should be very careful of their claws getting too close to our eyes. I nodded to show her I understood, slipped off my shoes, entered the meerkat pit, and plopped down with my legs crossed in preparation for a special new friend to approach me. Within seconds, a tender and loving meerkat jumped into my lap and started to snuggle against my arms and legs. It was cuteness overload. Within a few minutes of petting my new BFF, I forgot about the warning I had been given and picked up my phone to take a photo of the two of us as proof of our newfound companionship, and he promptly turned in my lap, jumped up onto my chest and swiped at my eyeballs. He barely missed my cornea with his hand daggers and instead scratched the skin underneath my eye and then darted away as I jerked my head back, dropped my phone, and put my hands to my face. After the shock of what happened wore off, I looked around in complete embarrassment that I had almost had a terrible incident with this now fuzzy foe, and left the café quickly, thinking only of how grateful I was to be looking for a place to have lunch in Seoul and not for an emergency room in a foreign country.