Asian Haircuts

Whoot whoot! It's Friday.

So after an excruciating Chinese class, we headed down to the train ticket office to try to get tickets for the Chinese New Year. As the Chinese New Year is the biggest travel holiday on the Chinese calendar, this was no easy task. Three other students on my program, Amanda, Alex, Trent and I are heading to Hong Kong for the Chinese New Year. As many of you know, I have to leave the country every 90 days, so by making this trip to Hong Kong, now, I will be able to hold off another trip outside of the country until my Spring Break.

The place was a zoo. Where most people will let you speak broken Chinese to them, the train people would not. Since it was packed, they had no time for anything but fluent Chinese. So we called You Sha on the cell phone and she translated for us what we needed. Our plan is to take a 24 hour train to Guilin, in the southern part of China. Guilin is famous for the Li River which flows up to a small rural town, Yangzhou (I believe) which is the base town of one of the most beautiful mountains in China. For one day we will cruise up the Li River and visit the mountain. The second day we plan to visit some of the many caves in Guilin, and do some other site seeing before heading to Hong Kong.

After we had our tickets in hand and we had grabbed a bit of lunch, Amanda, Elinor, Trent, and I spontaneously realized we were badly overdue for haircuts. ((I think I had split ends about an inch long.)) Obviously, given the language barrier, it's not something a novice would want to undertake. Despite the risk of a bad hair cut for the next 3 months, we decided to head to the salon right down the street from our school.

They were crazy excited to see Americans. They gave us our own private area, a balcony over the rest of the salon to do our hair. There were 4 of us there to get haircuts. One girl, who has phenomenal Chinese (she lived here for a year in high school), went with us to supervise.

At any given point there were no less than 6 Chinese hairdressers attending to us or hitting on us as the case most frequently was... Interestingly, only men were actually stylists and allowed to cut. The girls were only there to massage and wash hair. My hair washer made me promise 12 times that we were best friends. I promised. I also asked her if she liked Jay Chao. She does...



Amanda got highlights. Hilariously enough, they dont use foils. They rip pages out of magazines.



We grabbed magazines and picked out the hair cuts most like the ones we desired and then showed them to the staff. One guy, Yan Yu Long, was apparently the only person who knew how to cut curly hair (which surprisingly all four of us had). So he cut all of our hair. He was great, because each of us picked out hair styles, and he honestly told us, with your hair/ your face, that won't look good. My biggest concern going in is that my stylist wouldn't have ever cut anything but Asian hair, and so he wouldn't know what to do with my wavy-curly mess.

We called him the master, because all the other male hair stylists just stood around and watched. He has been cutting hair for 8 years. He's 24. Such a cutie.

Yan Yu Long and I


After he told me that he couldn't give me the cut I wanted, because it wouldn't work with my hair, I gave him free reign. "I want whatever you think will look good." I think it worked out perfectly. Here's a picture of us on Wednesday night, and then here's a picture after our sassy new dos.

Amanda, me, and Elinor at M2.


Chillin in the Dorms...after our new dos.

After our 4 hour hair appointment, we were craving something American. We headed to McDonalds. The spicy cucumber quarter pounder caught my eye. Delicious. While some dishes are a little different, it is McDonalds: world reknowned provider of consistency.

Early to bed. Saturday, we're going on a day trip to Xitang, a traditional water town. Made famous by Mission Impossible 3.