::A Geek in Korea::

My previous stylist has stopped cutting hair. Her popularity led her to stand at work so much that she developed a hip problem and had to retire early. Talk about occupational hazards. I had no idea that was even possible. Anyway, now I’m forced to go to from stylist to stylist, even sure how my hair will turn out. I don’t really worry about getting regular hair cuts, but one of my old coworkers is getting married, and we are under orders to "Look good" from the bride. As such, I needed to go get a hair cut and have it not turn out to be a disaster. My wife was along to do some shopping, so we went to the hair salon together to get my "hair situation" settled.

I’m not fluent in English conversations about haircuts, let alone Korean. I simply go to a place to make my hair more socially acceptable at a reasonable price and let them worry about the details. As long as my hair is marginally shorter and my scalp isn’t visible, I’m happy. I’m a far cry from my first year in Korea where I would turn up at a small hair shop, grab a book, tell them "like this", and just nod along as they sliced at my ears. My vocabulary has grown to include words and phrases like, "Hey, not so short", or "I’m bleeding."

Today, the man that cut my hair had a few choice things to say about my shampoo. He was telling me that the brand I was currently using wasn’t suitable for my skin, and that the other brands I had previously used ranged in quality anywhere from "bad a cleaning hair"  to "likely to make me bald". Yikes. Now, this is just what I understood of all the advice he was giving me. During the twenty minutes or so he was cutting my hair, he went on, at length, about all sorts of things that were wrong with my hair.

I wasn’t helped by the fact that my wife basically left me to the stylist. He asked her if I understood Korean well enough to get a haircut, and she agreed. He must have taken this to mean I had a wonderful grasp on the language and wanted to hear about every single detail of haircare he had learned. He told me how I should now part my hair, gave me shampoo technique advice (palms, not fingers!) , and generally spouted off enough vocabulary I didn’t know that I was reduced to simply nodding (potentially a huge mistake in a salon chair) and saying, "Yes," to everything. He’s the guy with the scissors near my ears and neck, it’s best not to make him too angry.

I walked out with a decent hair cut and more knowledge about shampoo that I ever knew I needed.