Animal cafe experiment number two: uncovering my inner zen at a sheep cafe (with no lamb chops)

I love sheep. Lambs to be precise. Always have. I went through a stage where I had a collection of soft toy lambs that would sleep with me. But I loved one best of all. His name was Lamb. He had two arms, no legs and red and white stripy ears and he had been my rock since I was born. He had survived many unexpected incidents with washing machines, hotel cleaners who would either mistake him for rubbish or would bundle him up in the sheets and take him away (I do, however, have very fond memories of a hotel in Vienna where the cleaning staff would place Lamb in a different position after making the bed, arranging chocolate all around him) and high school boyfriend and the antics of his friends (it is not actually funny to pretend to hang Lamb from a bunk bed when I let you take him away for the weekend as a sign of my undying love (which, btw and not totally unrelated, did die shortly thereafter)). Numerous rescue missions have been launched to retrieve Lamb. Discreetly stealing him back from the laundry basket and mum's over-eager Wednesday washing sessions is the tamest and perhaps least embarrassing. The frantic, and slightly manic, calls to the laundry divisions of hotels and desperate pleas to hotel managers to use their years of hotel management training to find Lamb are probably the more embarrassing moments (all the more so when you are over 30 and on a work trip).

Sadly, our many decades of togetherness came to an end late last year when Lamb went missing in a hotel (again) in South Korea and, this time, he didn't make it back. I made numerous attempts in my Konglish (way more English than Korean) to recover him and my adorable eldest daughter assisted by posting her handmade signs in black texta and on ripped scraps of paper by our door, by the lift, inside the lift and in the hotel lobby (much to the hotel staff's amusement and the manager's slight frustration). But Lamb never came home and all I have been left with is his once pink, now shabby chic, apricot jacket that I stole off Barbie in Grade 3.

I have been using art therapy as a way of dealing with my sadness. This is my latest picture of a sheep and another of sheep. 

I never thought I would ever find another who would love sheep/lambs more than me or even the same as me (husband is useless, having  never understood why it is I won't (or can't) cook or eat lamb chops). Helping me through this newly Lamb-less time in my life have been my kids - two-thirds of which have adopted lambs of their own with no forcing by me at all (it is just a coincidence that the only soft toys I have ever brought them happen to be lambs). The youngest in particular needs “Mary Lamb” to go to sleep with and will often sneaks her into the school backpack. But their love of lambs, and even perhaps my own, has been eclipsed by the owner of the aptly named "Thanks Nature" cafe, serving waffles, bacon, whipped cream, bing su (shaved ice concoctions ubiquitous in Seoul's summer), no lamb chops, all in the company of two very happy sheep. 

 

For such a huge city, Seoul has done well to protect and maintain patches of green but nothing can replace a full field of grass and I think this is what you instinctively think of when you see the sheep at the cafe. You forget for a moment that the city is just above you (the cafe is down a set of stairs) and the meditative feeling that wide, open space brings to your soul wells up. Add to this the presence of sheep, which, according to the characteristics ascribed to this wooly mammal by the Chinese Zodiac, are all about sincerity, gentleness and compassion - traits that sometimes in the hustle and bustle of Seoul's everyday life I sadly sometimes forget about - and you may just be achieving a zen like state. So, because I can't get Lamb back, have a deep seated need to visualise green and could probably do with practising a bit more gentleness and compassion (especially so if you ask my children), visiting the sheep cafe in Hongdae more often than not seems like a pretty good idea.