Ah yes, the lazy yawning cat to your left there is none other than Noodles.

That’s not actually her real name on her passport though – and yes, both of my cats have passports. It’s kind of ironic that my cats have EU passports and have more rights to live and “work” here than I do, but so it goes. I guess I must admit, these cats are even more Romanian than I am!

Despite the fact that I live in Cluj and there are millions of fine cats for adoption in this country, both of my cats are from somewhere else. Noodles came to me from the beautiful city of Brasov, which I love and hold very dear to my heart.

An ex-girlfriend of mine lives in Brasov and has a cat with the interesting name of “Terror Blue” and while being a very sweet and amazing and loving cat ahem *coughcough* Miss Terror Blue was quite popular with the local boys and spent a good part of 2008 giving birth to a large number of kittens – one of which is my baby girl Noodles, yay!

Noodles came to me via riding the riding the rails of CFR and spent most of her time sleeping in a tiny cardboard box or else being passed around from passenger to passenger, charming one and all, as she is wont to do.

She still does. Not a single person ever comes to my house without immediately falling in love with her and wanting to pet her non-stop, etc, etc. When I used to take her to the veterinarian quite often (for her shots), I literally never once made it without a child rushing over to her and wanting to play with her and ask me a million questions about her. She’s a person magnet.

But the reason I call her Noodles is because this cat is completely insane – if you look inside her head, I’m completely convinced that all you would see is a wriggling mass of worms eating her brain cells. There’s no other explanation possible as to why she’s constantly, constantly “talking” and jumping way too high for the laws of physics to explain and “yelling” at the corner of the ceiling and all the other stuff she does.

She’s my little baby though and I love her a lot, even when she’s in “Bitey Mode” and thinks my fingers are the world’s greatest chew toy.

This is my other cat, known far and wide as Mr. Zig although once again, that’s not his name on his passport.

You might be wondering why my cats have super secret spy “aliases” but essentially I didn’t name either one of them. That’s why. So their real names on their paperwork were chosen by boring people and I call them by their super cool names so NOW YOU KNOW!

Mr. Zig was born on the mean streets of Timisoara, where a different ex-girlfriend of mine’s mother found him tiny, shivering and hungry. Said mother nursed him with a homemade concoction of kitten-appropriate milk until he was properly weaned. By then he was “too much” to deal with so he was given to a friend of my ex-girlfriend’s to live with for a short while.

I have no idea of the details of his short but apparently quite traumatic stay at the friend’s house. All I know is one very cold winter’s day I got the call and showed up in Timisoara with a cage and found that the friend was covered in severe scratches, Mr. Zig was wide-eyed and crazy looking, there were reports of “mass destruction” in the apartment and he had no shots or vaccinations whatsoever. He also was apparently the only cat in history who didn’t know how to use the litter box.

Poor guy spent one frightful (to him) night in my hotel room and then I carried him home on CFR myself and then introduced him to Noodles, who promptly yelled at him and intimidated him and otherwise let him know she was Queen of the Castle.

But… that was then. Now he’s a happy, fat little monkey who is super sweet and loving. He’s the “good” cat between the two of them and yes, they are super friends now and play all the time and sleep together and about once a day engage in what I call lucha libre because they look like two Mexican midgets flying off chairs and sofas to perform smackdown moves on each other.

Mr. Zig has a heart of gold and is extremely sweet and mild-mannered and generally always happy to just sit around and grin at nothing and relax and destroy nothing in my house. He’s never once scratched me, even a little during playtime, and uses the bathroom just as perfectly as you’d ever want a cat to do. Whatever happened to him before I got him is just going to have to be a mystery because he’s really the perfect cat.

He is also, strangely enough, the world’s quietest cat. He’s never once meowed in my presence ever. About the most he’ll ever do is make a kind of weird “squeaking” noise whenever he’s extremely hungry but that’s about it. The rest of the time? BLESSED SILENCE.

Also – and don’t tell Noodles this – but despite the fact he’s kind of “simple” and not extremely bright or sneaky or cunning or crafty – he’s far braver than Noodles is. Whenever someone new comes to my house, she runs for the hills and scrambles to hide under the sofa or the bathtub while he just trots right over for an inspection and a hey, how ya doing?

Fun fact: my landlord, who usually comes over slightly drunk, thinks to this day I have only one cat because Mr. Zig is sitting there being his charming self on the sofa or something while Noodles is hiding and the landlord never sticks around long enough for her to pop back out – LOL – fun times.