Join our cats and be part of our journey towards our own cat sanctuary in Zwickau, Germany

Detalles

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  Descripción

  Time for a major profile update. Those who know us and stayed with us, know, that our life is all about cats and other animals as well as about living a happy healthy vegan life. 🌱
  
  We are Sonia and Levent plus our good friend Filly, three crazy cat people, who currently reside in Zwickau, Germany, together. 😻
  
  The current mission is to open a Cat Sanctuary, most likely in Southern Spain. We're just in the beginning of planning and working towards this and hope to make that move in the second half of 2025.
  
  The cats and us - how it all started
  
  Our cat story began in 2022, when we (Sonia and Levent) moved from the UK to Italy with an "open end approach", not knowing how long we might stay or where we might go next.
  
  We started taking care of the many feral street cats and occasional stray dogs and before we knew it ended up with 10 + cats inside the house who became our permanent family. In collaboration with local vets and an adoption sanctuary in the North of Italy we managed to get a few more dozens off the streets and into families.
  
  For annoying bureaucratic reasons we had to move to Germany in December 2022. Zwickau was a random choice really, as neither of us has any connection with the place.
  
  We got into Workaway thanks to a Couchsurfer who stayed with us in Italy and told us about her cat sitting experience through the platform. It sounded perfect for us, as especially at that time we sometimes had to leave the country and needed reliable people to look after our cats.
  
  Compared to Zwickau, our location in Italy was a lot more attractive of course, but nevertheless we still kept hosting after moving countries and continued to have great Workaway hosting experiences. Now there are two scenarios of us hostiing workawayers.
  
  1. We are away
  
  Sometimes things in life come up and we have to leave town or the country. In that case, we always need people to stay with the cats. Now with three people in the house it's less likely that none of us is around, but still. If this scenario comes up, ideally we want to spend a few days with you to show you everything and to make sure you know the quirks of each cat and all the "security measures" to keep them and our belongings safe 😹
  
  While we are away you simply take our role, you live in our house, take care of yourself and do all the cat duties. That means feeding, giving water, cleaning the litter boxes and loads of cuddling and playing. Apart from that you are free to do whatever you wish, stay in, go out, explore the town, etc..
  
  2. We are home
  
  When we are at home we simply share the house with you, we're happy if you help cleaning the litter boxes and keeping the house "tidy", in inverted commas because the cats have changed the definition of the word 😂
  You don't need to worry about the feeding. As for the cuddling and playing, our cats love all the attention they can get.
  Also if you want to get involved into the planning of our future Cat Sanctuary, if you have any ideas and if you're good with Social Media, your help is very much appreciated in that area as well!
  
  
  Important things to know about the area and about us:
  
  Location & surroundings:
  
  We live super central, a few minutes walk from the typical shopping areas and in walking distance from supermarket, restaurants, the odd bar or café and a nice green area with a big pond. Zwickau is not huge, certainly not exciting, but actually a great location in itself, not far from Dresden, Leipzig, Northern Bavaria, Berlin and also Prague in the Czech Republic.
  
  
  Our house:
  
  We live in a very comfortable apartment on the third floor in a block of flats. The building is modern and very well insulated and quiet on the inside. However, there is a church very near by which dingdongs regularly, and exaggerates a bit when it's Mass time 😂. With the windows closed this "noise" will be very faint however.
  
  Originally only Sonia and Levent lived in this apartment and there are two bed rooms. Filly moved in with us in August 2024 and she has her own room now.
  
  The other bedroom, where Sonia and Levent sleep, is also occupied by two of our cats at the moment and for one of them, our elderly girl, it's more permanent, as she refuses to leave that room. 🤷
  
  When we have workawayers now, Sonia and Levent will vacate the bedroom and sleep in the living room. That means, our workawayers can take the main bed room but won't have a cat free zone, because at least two cats will be with them.
  
  About us:
  
  Sonia and Levent lived in the UK for most of our lives but are both only half British and half in identity crisis 🤣. We got married in 2019 and moved to Italy one year later. We are vegan and really love cooking and trying out new things and experimenting in the kitchen.
  
  Our cooking styles are respectively fairly different from each other's so we certainly cover all types of dishes. Filly is also vegan since forever and is a lot into fruits and loves cutting them up and having them ready in the fridge for everyone.
  
  Levent is an excellent chef, does amazing burgers, sandwiches and most importantly Turkish specialties. I (Sonia) claim to make better pasta dishes than any Italian, I love cooking Thai or Indian curries and huge vegetable stews and soups, but Levent is definitely the main chef, as I hardly have time for really nice cooking. I often cook something separate for myself because I'm hugely into strong spices, while at the same time being totally oil and mostly salt free for health reasons.
  
  We have no fixed times for eating and even among us three we have our individual rhythms, we basically never eat at the same time, so please feel free to just listen to your own hunger drive and eat whenever you want.
  
  Overall we're trying to live as healthy as possible, though we know there's huge room for improvement. We don't smoke, but our one naughty vice would be our regular beer and/or wine. Also no doubt we could incorporate more movement and sports into our daily life. Levent and Filly manage to get regular walks into their schedule but I'm basically glued to my laptop for work for most of the day.
  
  Our daily life is rather unspectacular. We get up early and don't go to bed super late mostly and work (Sonia from home) and take care of the animals in between. We very rarely go out in the evening, even though we'd like to do it more often. On the weekends, provided the weather is nice, we usually go to the lake.
  
  As for the rest, we're fairly uncomplicated people, we take each day as it comes without expectations, we're calm but also love good conversations and love to hear about other people's life journeys and experiences.

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  Tipos de ayuda y oportunidades de aprendizaje

  Cuidado de animales

  Ayuda doméstica

  Ayuda informática
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  Intercambio cultural y oportunidades de aprendizaje

  Animals always teach so so much. When we're not away, we would personally also be around with the workawayer(s). We can teach you a lot about health and nutrition, about life in general the way we live it and see it.

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  Ayuda

  Quick summary of the things already explained in the introduction:
  
  - cat feeding
  - cleaning litter boxes
  - cat cuddling and playing
  - keeping the house "tidy"
  - potentially helping with our cat sanctuary Social Media presence

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  Idiomas

  Idiomas hablados
  Alemán: Fluido
  Inglés: Fluido
  Italiano: Fluido
  Turco: Fluido
  Español: Intermedio
  Francés: Intermedio
  Árabe: Principiante
  Japonés: Principiante
  Holandés: Principiante

  Este anfitrión ofrece intercambio de idiomas
  Languages are one of the most fascinating things to dedicate your time to. The most present languages in our daily life are English, Turkish, German and Italian. We're actually sometimes speaking some hybrid language of them all but we can definitely teach anyone interested a bit of any of those languages. On our bookshelf there are actually many more study books for various languages of the world, but sometimes more for decoration 😁
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  Alojamiento

  Another quick summary:
  
  - location in central Zwickau
  - spare private bed room for workawayers
  - easy access to other and bigger cities

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  Algo más...

  We have heard some not so nice stories from workawayers concerning previous experiences. We do not use this platform to exploit people, make people work for hours on end while being lazy ourselves or anything like that. We think this platform is perfect for our cat vs. travel dilemma and are genuinely interested in the cultural exchange that comes with hosting.
  
  And if we do manage to build up that cat sanctuary in Spain there will be so many new exciting things to do for all of us!
  
  For how things are now, you'll have plenty of "time off", you can go to town or other near by cities any time and just feel free and at home. We will host you like old friends and hopefully when you leave you are a new friend :)

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  Un poco más de información

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    Acceso a Internet

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    Acceso a Internet limitado

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    Tenemos animales

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    Somos fumadores

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    Puede alojar familias

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  Puede acoger a nómadas digitales

  Definitely.

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  Podría aceptar mascotas

  Depends on the pet I would say. Our cats are terrified of and/or super hostile towards dogs, most of them would hide under the sofa in fear of death, others might viciously attack the dog, so that wouldn't work. Another cat could maybe work I guess, but it would probably just take a while for everyone to accept each other :) In the unlikely case you're doing workaway with any other animal, if they're small (tortoise, hamster, rat, spider,...), that would be actually super cool and we'd be up for it :D

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  ¿Cuántos voluntarios puedes hospedar?

  Dos

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  Horas esperadas

  no specific hours, super flexible

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