Friday, April 9, 2010

Haar Angst

My hair is incredibly bouncy today, and incredibly chin-length. With my knee-length coat and my bag full of groceries, I look exactly like a mother from the nineties, albeit a mother attempting to hug an U-bahn pole to herself as she avoids the glances of all the silent Germans on the train.

How have I come to this? The answer is that today, I went to a German hair salon, tired of the inch or so of dead ends on me. (I also have a date, albeit one that entails watching football, but still a date.) My entire strategy of dealing with salespeople and shopkeepers and servicepeople in general here is to say as little as possible, sticking to "Ja". Because I frequently look very ninetiesish, they tend to think I'm --- if not from here -- at least from some Eastern European country, and not from America.

It was a sort of factory-farm hair salon, with each haircut eleven euro, take a number and go to a stylist when your number pops up on the screen and the sound system beeps electronically. My personal stylist, who was dressed exactly like Trinity, asked me something while she was washing my hair. Naturlich I said "Ja", and so therefore got to sit for roughly forty minutes while she deep-conditioned it, put a towel over it, and forgot about me.

It was, however, a pretty good opportunity to observe everyone else there. Each hairstylist was dressed like they were going to a club, which they may have been, considering that it is Friday and they all seem like they know how to party. The one stylist in particular that I was observing was a modelesque young man who knew how to handle a blow-dryer. He was spending far too long styling the hair of another modelesque young man, despite the giant line of poor, impatient teenagers waiting. They kept chatting, and smiling at each other in the mirror. It was nice, if a little bit, as a woman, discouraging.

Eventually the woman showed up, apologized, hacked at my hair, and handed me the blow-dryer. The result isn't terrible. It's better than it would have been in, say, Morris, or at least as good... but not as good as the time my ex-boyfriend and I walked into a barbershop in Italy and, without saying anything, the stylist just whipped his hair into this sex-bomb shape. Of course, mine was eleven euro, so...egal.

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