Pantai Panorama is our apartment complex, and there are a bunch of cats who live here. It’s not like Indonesia, where there was one dominant cat (Tika Splotch) whom we regularly saw and that’s it. For some reason, while we occasionally saw other cats there, we didn’t see any cats regularly enough to name them. Here, things are different.
So, because we are sort of lunatics when it comes to cats, here we go.
- Teddy Bear Teddy Bear is the alpha male at Pantai Panorama, and the first one with whom we made our acquaintance. He gets his name because he has a funny shaped head that is reminiscent of Abyssinian cats, which kind of reminds us of a teddy bear. He’s also big and burly like a teddy bear. Teddy Bear is always prowing around the complex, putting his scent on things as only an un-neutered cat can do. He is perfectly willing to stare us down when we fuss at him, because after all, he’s in charge.
- Fraidy Cat Our realtor lives just across the hall from us and has a big fat orange cat who is terrified of people. He always bolts away when he sees us, but we often hear him wailing outside of our neighbor’s door. Our other neighbor once scolded the owner while we were all in the elevator together for "getting in my door and eating all my potatoes".
- One Eye One Eye gets her name because she’s blind in one eye. You can tell because it’s all cloudy and stuff. She’s rather talkative and lives right at the exit of our building, often sitting under cars to escape the heat of the day. Sometimes she lets us pet her.
- Father and Daughter Father and daughter seem to be just that: a medium sized male cat who is always being trailed five yards behind by a smaller female kitten. These two are just big babies, though. Every time we see them they run over and meow at us, but they don’t like to be petted.
- Two Tone This cat gets her name from her totally weird coloring. She is stripey like many cats, but for some reason the base tones of her stripes are splotchy, half black with gray stripes and half orange with white stripes. We’ve never seen anything like it in a cat before–splotchy cats like calicos normally aren’t tiger striped, but Two Tone is. Two Tone is unfortunately not very nice. Sometimes we’ll be walking to the pool and we hear an annoying yowl from under a tree. That’s always Two Tone, who says that she does not want to play right now.
- Preggers As you might imagine, Preggers is always pregnant. When we first arrived, there was a white and black cat at the base of the hill to our complex who was pregnant. After a couple weeks she disappeared, and about a month ago a very similar looking cat appeared, also very pregnant. Sometimes she has a hanger-on, a little kitten, maybe from the last batch. Just today she ran up to me (TP) and meowed and rubbed against my leg looking for food. I petted her stomach trying to feel the babies, but I couldn’t feel anything because she was purring too loud.
- Guard Cat Guard cat lives at the guard post at the entrance to Pantai Panorama, and he wins the prize for laziest cat in the history of cats. When you walk past him and make noise, he won’t even open his eyes, he’s so lazy. He must be very used to the guards down there, even though we’ve never seen them pay any attention to him. He’s like the alpha male at the bottom of the hill, but we assume that he gets handouts from the guards so he’s not as manly at Teddy Bear who fends for himself.
- Dirty Kitty Dirty Kitty lives way at the bottom of the hill under the cars near the train station. We actually don’t know his gender, so we are just using "he" in the gender-neutral sense. He doesn’t like people very much, but he’s big and fat because he lives amid a whole bunch of food stalls. We call him Dirty Kitty because he looks like a white Siamese who rolled around in mud too much, but he has pretty eyes and a cute black nose.
- Sasquatch Sasquatch is the great unknown of our neighborhood. In case you don’t know what a sasquatch is, he’s the giant, hairy, mythical ape-beast who lives in the Pacific Northwest. We’ve only seen him twice, but he is definitely gigantic, the biggest cat we’ve ever seen. We are positive that he is not a dog, but he seems to be about the size of a large poodle or small pit bull (for this reason, I object to tp’s name for this critter; I like to call him Dog Cat -jm). We are not even kidding, he’s immense.
