Hair, Elvis, Greetings and an Ancient Greek joke

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I’ve found, whilst doing this in various different places, that sometimes it’s the normal, mundane things that are the most difficult to accomplish. In my case, getting a haircut abroad is something that makes me want to go into a corner, roll up into a ball and start sucking my thumb.

This, I think, is largely down to a particularly painful experience in Beijing where with all the cunning logic of a fox, we reasoned the barbers there would be more used to cutting Westerners hair than those in our remote location (home to four and a half million people by the way) and so we delayed the necessary for longer than we probably should have until we went on holiday to the big smoke. This apparently flawless plan, turned out to have rather a large flaw in it which was that we chose a place that claimed to be able to understand our rather unique mix of mangled Chinese and miming, but couldn’t, which became immediately apparent when my guy took out his razor (not a euphemism) and went round the back and sides of my head with it, removing almost all of the hair. Obviously, in terms of a haircut, there is no going back from this point, and it didn’t get any better aside from giving me 10 minutes or so of staring in the mirror trying to get used to it as he finished what he was doing. Jon, in the next chair, was pissing himself and ended up with nothing worse than an Elvis-style quiff which just took a shower to sort out. I, on the other hand, wound up looking like Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

So, all this, alongside my natural uneasiness in these situations, was playing on my mind when I went for a long overdue trip to the barbers here.

Luckily, although my grasp of the language here is only a half a rung above woeful, it’s still a good deal better than my Chinese ever was, so that helped a little. As did the opening question of asking if I was going to the following day’s Celta Vigo promotion decider (Unfortunately I was, as it turned out to be just about the worst footballing experience of my life), which, if nothing else, helped to settle me down quite a lot. Enforced small-talk with strangers tends to make me feel a little weird and usually makes me want to make up lies for no reason, but I’ve got into trouble doing that before and with barbers and hairdressers I tend to go along with the Ancient Greek joke that goes



“How would you like your hair cut, sir?”

‘In silence’



(You’re all jealous of my Classics degree now, aren’t you!)

Here, however, the small-talk was quite welcome, in addition to the fact that silence, when there is any more than one Spanish person in a place, is as good as unheard of here, so it wasn’t even really an option.

The only China-like scare was when he appeared to be fashioning something not too far away from a mullet, but it didn’t turn out to be too bad, so I made it out relieved and happy, having impressed a few people, initially at least, with my knowledge of Celta’s season up to then.

Again, on the small mundane things, I love the differences in these things that exist between different cultures – things that you are so used to that you just assume they must be the same everywhere. Different ways of answering the phone for example, you’d assume it would just be that country’s own version of the word ‘Hello’ but not always. (Although, of course, the old Mr Burns’ “Ah Hoy Hoy” must surely be acceptable everywhere). In China it’s a specific greeting used only on the phone, which sounds like “Whey”. Here, it’s often the rather brusk “Digame” which means “Speak to me”. The whole haircut thing is rather different too. Washing and shampooing before and after, something that wasn’t far away from a head-massage too and the best bit was that they tape the kind of gown thing to the back of your neck to stop any discarded hair from falling down your back, which seems simple now I say it, but at the time that was hairdressing’s version of inventing the wheel to me. I probably looked a little too impressed at this, in reality, fairly logical, routine thing, because our conversation soon dried up and I just got a few funny looks off him and the guy next to me after that - the kind that you might give a child who is enjoying playing with the box their present came in, more than with the present itself. I didn’t care all that much by the end though because at worst I got a haircut which could have been described as fluffy, rather than one which prompts people to ask if I’ve seen Carlton or Uncle Phil recently.



Pura Vida



Dave

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