After months of planning, my cat finally arrived in Switzerland on Friday, after a long journey from New Zealand. Thinking back to February, when I was desperately looking for apartments, one of my criteria was that my cat would be happy in whatever apartment I found. I was primarily looking for a ground-floor apartment, with a good outside area for her, and that I would be able to put in a cat door. She is 11 years old, and has been an inside-outside cat her whole life, with cat doors since she was about 4, so there was no way I was going to have an apartment where she couldn't go outside, or where she would be limited to a balcony, or where I would have to open doors for her.

Unfortunately, ground-floor apartments are pretty rare. The girlfriend of my boyfriend's flatmate told me that it's pretty common in Switzerland, for people to have cat ladders (katzentreppe (cat stairs) for this reason. Typically, I turned to the internet for this, and found the most amazing website. My absolute favourite is this incredible one, which just blows me away.

At any rate, yesterday my amazing boyfriend built me a cat ladder, with a little help from the neighbour's children. It took a little bit of coercion before the cat would go down the steps, but finally she did, after another neighbour came along and bribed her with chocolate, and I managed to get photos of the first descent:









Awesome.