cat-sitting again

There aren’t that many flights out of Dushanbe, and looking at possible stop-overs to use the eleven days before I needed to meet my tour group in Xi’an, the prime candidate was Istanbul – not in the now expensive city (although it's still one of my favourites in the world), but saving some money, and taking a rest, at the cat shelter near the airport.  I asked the owner, and she was very happy to have me back, as she was to be out of the country and my presence would enable her to give her local helpers some time off.

But, really, is it worth the cost-saving??  It’s not that I mind re-filling food and water bowls or cleaning litter trays, it’s the time between that is difficult.  There’s very little internet connectivity, so backing-up photos or perusing YouTube is not possible, and I quickly got through the one book I brought with me. but in any case, the over-arching ’problem’ is the attention from all the cats.  They want to be loved, so they climb all over me (and all over whatever I’m trying to do or read), and compete for my attention; typically I have some eight cats and kittens on my lap, shoulders, etc, at any one time, sometimes just purring away, but often pressing against my hands and face for strokes… sounds nice, perhaps, but imagine that for all waking hours, for ten days!!  (at night they also surround me, but I find that easier to deal with)

In theory I could go out somewhere for the five or six hours between completing the morning duties and starting the late afternoon ones, but this is not helped by the fact that the state of the house, as a result of cheap materials, settlement, and some earth tremors earlier this year, means that none of the doors or windows now close.  Well, apart from the metal front door, but that takes a lot of energy to close, and I could not work out how to open it from the outside, meaning that re-entering the house after going out involved taking off my shoes and climbing in through the kitchen window!!