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Published: October 5th 2008
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Well good evening blog fans. Those of you expecting a factual account of our latest family endeavours are in for disappointment, however for those few of you who are actually interested in the mind numbing observations of a puerile, nay juvenile nincompoop this is the entry for you. I think it has been decided that I will do the hairdressing critiques, and will occasionally act as stand in when Joanna is out getting ginned up. I have tried to gain additional column inches (I said puerile) with a spot on funny sign logging, but the editor of this travel blog is as yet unconvinced of such a features worthiness .... if you disagree please write in!
For those of you who avidly read about my last hair adventure you will be delighted to hear that it was that time again, and what with a new job tomorrow I decided to get it done tonight! However, wanting to make a good impression on my first day I decided to dispense with Keevins services and walk slightly further to the 'salon' where Sophie and William get their haircut. Now this actually served two purposes in my head, firstly both the children survived
their ordeals unscathed and neither came out looking ridiculous, secondly as a grade a tightwad their haircuts both cost about 80 pence so at least if the cut goes badly I have saved some money. So it was with a cheery disposition and the quixotic smile of a man about to go over the top that I waved Joanna goodbye, leaving the safety of the appartment and walked out into the foreboding Shanghai night!
On entering the salon I was asked to sit down in a barbers chair ... 'a good start' I thought. They made the mime for cut and wash which I made the affirmative mime of agreement to .... and then events took a diversion from the norm. 60 seconds after entering into my contract a young lady in a red polo shirt and jeans (the helpers/washers/sweepers in this establishment sport a red ‘Burberry’ poloshirt uniform top with jeans, making me pleased I wasn’t wearing my red Paul Smith poloshirt - oooh the clash) put a large bag down next to my chair, a paper coffee cup of hot water in front of me - with a pink plastic grip attached, a squeezy bottle, and an
industrial sized pot of shampoo. She then attached a towel around my neck, smiled and gunged me! I couldn’t quite believe my eyes but it seemed I was to receive the hairwash sat in the middle of the ‘salon’, and the lady kept adding the three ingredients to my head like she was following a very tricky recipe. This process continued for about 30 minutes, during which time my eyes got wider, my smile got broader, and the mushroom cloud of foam on top of my head rose to about 6 inches (although I am not a very good judge!). I can only assume she was killing time until the ‘stylist’ was ready as there seemed no obvious reason for the length of this procedure, although it did enable her to blunt her nails on my scalp.
At the point where I thought I was going to have to ring home and explain I couldn’t make it back tonight she suddenly swiped her hand across my head, removing my foam hat, and motioned me to follow her. I was a little surprised to then be led into a room which had the ordinary run of the mill hair washing chairs and sinks, and was sat down, with a rolled up hot towel behind my neck, and had my hair rinsed .... and washed again (although on reflection this could have been a comment on the state of my hair)! I then laid there for a further 5 minutes whilst she continually adjusted the water temperature behind me, a fact that I was able to glean from the differing temperatures of the droplets which occasionally caught me, and then suddenly turned the water off without doing anything else.
On returning to my barbers chair, she said something to me, which with hindsight might have been ‘brace yourself pale face’, I smiled and nodded, and she began to beat me around the neck and shoulders. When her muscles were tired from delivering this punishment, she pulled up a stool alongside me, sat down, folded her legs and laid my right arm across them. Now its been a while since I last watched ‘Escape to Victory’ where they lay the goalies arm across some bed planks to break it so that Sylvester Stallone can stand in, but at this precise moment it was vivid in my mind. Luckily she intended much worse for me and had a more devilish plan to remove my bicep from the bone using the ‘thousand tiny tugs’ technique, closely followed by seeing if she could pull my fingers out of their sockets. This continued for 5 minutes before she swapped sides and made sure my left arm didn’t feel left out. Then she pushed my head down and made me lean up against the counter while she attacked the rest of my back, and like any good fighter, giving particular attention to the kidneys. Once she was happy with this, she looked at me suspiciously, perhaps surprised I hadn’t cracked and blubbed out everything I knew about anything and everything during the torture, and placed the stool back next to me. She then took four cotton buds and looked at them lovingly before smiling at me menacingly and started to unpick the cotton on the ends until there wasn’t much left, but what there was hung loose and then put them into my ear .... all the way into my ear! She then placed the buds in front of me and left without so much as a ‘You have been a worthy adversary’!
Enter stage right John Taylor from Duran Duran, or his Chinese lookalike anyway, who looked at me and started cutting. Now I have been to enough hairdressers to know that they tend to ask you what you want doing, but the way things had been going thus far in this place I decided that discretion was the better side of valour and let him get on with it. At one point I thought he intended to cut each hair individually, but then without warning he got bored and tore (yes tore) great swathes of hair out at a time. At this stage he decided to show me the cut throat razor and I thought a tidy neckline at my new work would be good so I agreed and he called someone who took me back to the hair washing chairs, sat me down and washed my hair. The young lady then said something and sprayed water on my face. So it was to be water torture now was it? But then it stopped and she wrapped steaming hot towels over my face and left me.
When she returned she showed me the cut throat razor, smiled and rubbed foam over my face, ‘oh no’ thinks our hero, ‘I didn’t mean that’, but being English and not wanting to back out of a contractual nod, I kept schtum. Now luckily for me the man who sharpens cut throat razors had obviously been away during the national holiday week, so things weren’t too hairy (no pun intended), but she did discover my neck touching phobia early on, much to her amusement - basically it creeps me out when people touch my neck which normally demonstrates itself in hysterical laughter and twitching. So getting a cut throat shave is probably not going to become a regular thing, although the results are very good and no nicks! I was led back to my chair as she told everyone about my neck phobia and they all laughed ‘at me’ so I now feel we have a connection.
Anyway, that was basically that. After a quick blow dry from John I was up and paying, 70RMB btw (about £5), and 40 RMB of that turned out to be for the shave. All in all, an hour and a half of bloggable entertainment and ‘life experience’ for £5 really is a bargain ... if the haircut had been half decent I might even have gone back!
The more astute of you may be asking why this entry has the ‘superheroes’ part to it? Well as a means of shoe horning some funny signs in under the editors nose I have chosen to add this one picture .... and would simply say that Chinese superheroes lack the glamour of western ones!
Good night all.
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Emma Woods
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I haven't laughed so much in ages!!!! Not enough to start labour off unfortunately but hilarious nonetheless!!