Ruffled

In the language challenged state I frequently find myself in, one of the most difficult situations to confront is the hairdressers. It's mainly the unspoken staring from both staff and customers while I'm trying to gesticulate as to roughly what I'm after that makes me feel rather awkward. In my local in Beijing I'm now quite used to this and have enough vocab to speak a little, so that is not too much of a problem anymore. They still haven't managed quite what I'm after but I think we're going in the right direction.The other great thing in Beijing is that if you get it all horribly wrong then the hair catastrophe which ensues is a remarkably cheap disaster (about 70p for cut).

The difference here in Japan, as I've just discovered, is that for the price of one major hairtastrophe, I could have at least 30 bad cuts in Beijing. After finding a hairdressers near my apartment and establishing that there was no common language between us, I was given several magazines to peruse and choose which of the Japanese men with very straight hair I would most like to look like (for those who don't know, my hair has waves upon curls upon waves, as soon as it gets long enough). I gave up and pointed to something which looked plausible and half an hour later walked out of the shop, substantially poorer (about two days Chinese wages), looking nothing like the man in the photo but with some semblance of having been to a barbers rather than a wind tunnel.

This is always a difficult situation and I've only ended up with a few really bad haircuts due to communication problems. I'm not expecting this situation to change much in the few months I have left in China.