So above you can see the before and after haircut photos. The first one was taken when we were on our adventure watching the rocks go down the hillside and the other was at KFC when we were in Jishou this past weekend. Even I don’t know why I was making those faces. 😛 But let me tell you about the journey that I had with my haircut.
This past Friday evening we set out to get our haircut. Jordan wanted to try this new place near the public square and so that was where we went. We didn’t find the guys that we were looking for and instead went to the next cleanest place on the street. Jordan got his haircut first and then it was my turn.
The reason that getting a haircut in China is so much of an adventure is that you don’t know what you are going to get just by the simple nature of the fact that the barbers never speak English. 😛 When I sat down I told them that I wanted finger-length all over. I tried to demonstrate this by pointing at my fingers, pointing at my hair and then eventually pointing at Jordan’s hair. The guy that was cutting my hair seemed to have understood it and got to work.
Expecting him to use the clippers (buzzers or whatever you call them), he started with the scissors but the thing was that he was doing it at about two finger-lengths (see pic at right). Since my hair was super long and is pretty fine I figure that he might be doing that so that the clippers might work better but then he started to make sure that every hair was the same length.
A bit concerned, I tried to tell him the length that I wanted a couple times and that didn’t seem to work. I eventually pointed to the clippers and he started using then. And cutting pretty short too. Jordan’s great line summed it up, “there’s no turning back now.” Boy was it true. My hair is a shorter than I was hoping that it would be. I feel victim to the language barrier.
On the upside, he spent a good amount of time making sure that it was all the same length since he did it by sight. Also, it should be a good length for when I go to Beijing and Shanghai at the beginning of July and I will look sexy in my pictures. My advice? Well, I don’t really have much advice, just that if you want a successful haircut in China, well, expect an adventure. 🙂