Haircut for $3.60

My adventure last night was to go to a get a haircut in my neighborhood. I wrote down a cheat sheet with the key vocabulary - haircut, wash hair, do you have time now, how much does it cost all together - and went off. Not brave enough for the hole in the wall places, I chose the nicest looking salon on the block and ended up staying there for over an hour: apart from washing my hair, the young woman then also gave me a 20 minute massage, which is apparently pretty standard with haircuts here - how nice. Afterwards, a guy named Sam cut my hair. All this cost me a total of 30 RMB, which is only about $3.60! My host mother was still unhappy with me, because she thought I should not have paid more than 10 RMB.

While he cut my hair, Sam and I chatted a little. He knew less English than I Chinese, so it was entertaining. He told me that Germans are great and that the Chinese love Germany. I told him I live in the U.S. and he asked me why, which made me laugh. Such a simple question, and so impossible for me to answer - especially in Chinese! Because I work there, I guess, and because I like it? Wanting to expand my vocabulary, I asked for the Chinese word for blonde. For this purpose, I asked him what color my hair is. Sam promptly got out his hair color chart with samples of 10 or so different shades of blonde and was quick to point out that the chart was made by Wella, a German company. Well, so now the problem was that the Chinese word for each different shade consited of six or seven characters. I asked him to read them to me and I tried to repeat, but I failed miserably. It is so sad, but it shows you how difficult Chinese is for me. ;-) I just laughed after a while and said, I would just have to call it huangde - yellow.

On the way out, I had to ask for my coat, which somebody had put into a closet and forgotten to get back out for me when I paid. So I got out my little dictionary and looked up the word for coat - dayi - and asked where it was. I had to repeat dayi a couple of times, until I got the tones right and they understood. Then everybody was just laughing - by that time, there were at least four people around who took an interest in my attempts of saying something in Chinese. Granted, they were super friendly and the whole haircut experience was fun and certainly successful, but it is still weird to have to communicate on such a simplified level and constantly struggle to be understood and to understand.