Haircut

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

After our delicious meal at the Nanxiang Xiaolongbao place in Old Town, I stopped at J. Eleven, a Chinese hair salon recommended to me by a friend from Harvard. If a British man with picky tastes can get his hair cut there for a whole semester abroad, I figured it was good enough for me to get a simple trim at.
The salon was pretty fancy (they used expensive Western shampoos and conditioners and the hairdresser definitely knew what he was doing), but still just a fraction of the price of what I would have to pay in the US! A few random observations: first of all, the hair washing experience is much nicer than in most American salons. Instead of a simple chair, they have you sit in a La-Z-Boy-esque recliner and there’s no hard sink edge to make your neck hurt.
I have to admit, though, I was nervous throughout the actual cutting process. I’m generally pretty nervous during all haircuts, so the added language barrier made me even more anxious. My hairdresser was a tall skinny Asian man with long man-bangs sweeping across his forehead (his hair put Justin Bieber to shame!) wearing a deep black V-neck t-shirt with a long man necklace. He was basically a quintessential Asian hipster, which made me fear he would give me some ‘alternative’ style haircut instead of something nice and classic. However, with a combination of Mandarin and hand gestures, I was able to convey what I wanted, and under my watchful eye things seemed to be going very well. After partially blow-drying my hair, though, he starting telling me “Ni you hen duo tofa” (“You have so much hair!”). I kept replying that I want to have a lot hair, but he insisted that it wouldn’t look good. Instead of using standard Western-style thinning shears, though, he just used a normal pair of scissors and starting cutting high up along the hair shafts and thinning out big locks of hair, nearly giving me a heart attack! (Women reading this can probably understand what I mean…) After what seemed like an eternity, the whole ordeal was over and although he angled my hair a bit higher than I’d like (giving me a few really short pieces of hair that stubbornly refuse to stay put when wear my hair up), the haircut came out really nice.