Korean Haircut

Well it was a long time coming, and those Christmas party pictures showed a lot of dead ends, so I decided to bite the bullet and go to a Korean hair salon. If there were not salons every block in my neighborhood, I might have traveled to Itaewon (the neighborhood around the USA Army base...needless to say it's where a lot of foreigners gather, and very few Koreans) but it's not my favorite area of Seoul so I try to stay away from it. Plus, I'm pretty easy going with my hair (remember the shades of red and black?) so I thought it would be an interesting cultural experience. Which it defintely was.

First of all, the guy spoke no English, so we were communicating entirely through hand gestures. My main goal was no bangs. Korean men and women really like their bangs. I was adamant on that point and that point alone, pointing to pictures of girls and women around my chair that had very blunt bangs and just shook my head and crossed my arms in the universal sign of "No." He definitely got it. First he started out with cutting my hair when it was dry. Definitely not how we do it at Salon Russo. He was pretty fun to watch. He would walk in 180 degree turns around my chair analyzing my head in deep thought and then he'd just drop to his knees, in an exaggerated I'm going to ask you to marry me pose, and start snipping. And snip, and snip, and snip. And snip.
I was kinda worried I was gonna get another of those disastorous pixie cuts but it turns out he was mostly thinning it. I swear half of my hair got cut off my head in those first few minutes before he reached for another of his instruments to actually cut the length of my hair. Aside from eliminating about 98% of my layers, I was fine with the cut. It ages me a few years, but I can still pull it back and I've always though short pony tails were cute. The next fun part came when he washed it- after the cut. As soon as my hair got wet he started doing all sorts of odd motions with it, like karate chopping it with his hands and rubbing it in between his hands really, really fast, as if they were pieces of flint and he was trying to start a fire. I didn't understand it at all but I was getting a really, really nice head massage but him at the same time so I didn't try to look up and see what he was doing. Maybe my hair was being rude and needed to get put in its place. I don' t know which but as soon as he started hair drying it in curls I was so fascinated by what he was doing. He basically divided my hair into five sections and curled all those sections around his fingers so they formed a single curl. I looked like an Hasidic Jew. It was the funniest thing I saw last night.

Well, the whole experience cost about 12,000.00 won, which is less thant $9. As soon as I left the salon I threw my hair up in a pony tail and scurried home, to analyze the damage. It's definitely not the chicest cut I've ever gotten, but it's far from the horribly Korean haircut I was warned it would be by teachers who prefer to travel two hours to get white people to do it. It was also the perfect cap to a very odd day- seeing as yesterday was Drama Festival. But I can only write about one odd Korean experience at a time, so I'll have to write about that later!