Ni Hao Folks!

 

After hearing about Ms. Li’s haircut story from her China trip (as I understand it, she showed them how much she wanted taken off, and they cut her hair to that length instead) I was weary about letting anybody come near my head with scissors. But, I’d been talking a lot about how much I wanted my hair to be short again, and so when the four of us passed a hair salon during an off-campus supermarket run, Ms. Babson and Jenny managed to convince me to give it a whirl.

The woman who washed my hair was very nice, but continued to ask me the same question in Chinese, to which I kept replying “My Chinese isn’t very good!”. She even brought her friend over to watch me look confused as she kept asking the question, and the wash ended with the two of them laughing exasperatedly at my total ignorance. She took me to sit in the chair of a nice young man holding scissors.

I was pretty sure I got the length I wanted across, so when he started cutting, I let myself relax a bit. I wasn’t nearly as terrified as I had been when I walked in the door! Halfway through the cut, he pulled out his phone and we began to have a nice chat using a translating app. He asked me where I was from and what I was doing here, and if we could be friends in real life and also friends on WeChat (unfortunately, we did not become friends on WeChat). Overall, it was a really nice experience! At the end he did try to style it in the Chinese/Korean style-with the hair curled under like a Shakespearean wig, so it looked extremely short- but once it fell out a bit, it was exactly what I’d asked for. Best of all? It only cost 60 yuan, or about $9. Crazy!

I’m really glad I did it, and I’m having a fantastic time in Hangzhou. I’m saving the Holy Grail of blog posts - the FOOD BLOG, of course- for the end of the journey, but I will say that Sunny is a lover of all kinds of food and I’ve tried more incredible dishes in the past week than I have in my whole life.

Peace!