by Russell Smeaton

Created on: September 04, 2009

When you move to another country a thousand and one things go through your mental checklist. Guidebook - check. Phrasebook - check. Spare underpants - check. I thought I had all angles covered and moved myself to China on a 9 month teaching contract. All well and good. I got myself settled in, got down to the fine art of teaching English to classes of screaming 5 year olds and got a handle on using chop sticks. I never quite got round to learning much of the language other than some basics but managed to justify it to myself by the rather rubbish argument that I was there to teach English, not to learn Chinese. Terrible, I know. Anyway, on a general day to day basis you can live very happily in China with a minimum of the local language. Supermarkets are pretty safe, if a little boring. Restaurants are a little bit more problematic but manageable with a bit of creative pointing (and a Chinese friend!). The one thing that I hadn't thought about was getting a hair cut.

Hair cuts can be stressful at the best of times. Why is this? At first I thought it was just me but it turns out a lot of my friends experience the same stress. Now that we're all getting on a bit, the self-enforced buzz cut has become de rigeur. Maybe it goes back to school days when a bad haircut would ensure that you were ridiculed in front of your peers and the girl you had a crush on. Who knows? Thinking on, it does seem like it's common which might explain why a haircut in my hometown is a very quick process to help your nerves. You go in, sit down, give some basic instructions, engage in some mundane chit chat, pay your cash and wham bam thank you ma'am you're done.

So how about China? I walked up and down the street where there seemed to be a huge gaggle of hair dressers. It seems in China that streets are full of the same kind of shop. You can walk down a street that sells nothing but plastic flowers. How could I go wrong? I picked the emptiest one to minimise what was potentially going to be a tricky situation. As I walked in, the bored looking assistant put down his paper, looked up and a look of panic flooded his eyes. I smiled awkwardly and mimed a pair of scissors cutting my hair. Alas my basic Chineselet me down and I think I said something like "Too big, too big". The message was passed and I think understanding was reached. I went to sit down on a chair but was ushered to a back room. What was going on? What had I mimed? What did he think I wanted? I'd heard about massage parlours

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