The hair up there

Not your everyday barbershop...

I've been living in Korea for almost two months now and my hair was starting to get a bit out of hand.  I've been keeping it pretty short for several years now and anytime I wait more than a month or so, it looks unkempt.  Finding a barbershop in South Korea poses a whole new set of issues, though.  First of all, most places to get your hair cut only cater to men or women, there are not any unisex shops that I have heard about since getting here.  As you could guess, there are many, many more female hair salons than male barbershops, so finding a spot for guy's can be difficult.  Once you find a spot that's specifically for men, you run into another potential problem.  Many of the places that have a barbershop pole outside the establishment aren't actually barbershops, they are a kind of mini-bordello.  These places employee fifty year old women that previously worked in the red light districts before they got too old.  Not exactly what I'm looking for in my life.  Supposedly, they write the names of these types of establishment in a different way (first and last words switched or something), but I don't read or write Hangul (Korean alphabet) so this isn't easy for me to figure out.  Knowing all of this information, I decided it was best if I just asked my director where to go to get a haircut.  Probably shouldn't have done that.

Over the years, I've been a bit of a fad chaser when it comes to haircuts.  Growing up in the eighties and early nineties makes this especially painful when looking at old photo albums.  I've had a full spike, half spike, mini-mullet, rat tail, bowl cut, side part, center skater part, buzz cut, straight razor shave... I've had it all at one point in time or another.  In my opinion, the absolute worst of my many bad cuts over the years occurred when I was in third grade.  (To give you some quick info here, my hair is very soft and very straight.)  For about 3 days in the late eighties, a strange half perm haircut came into style (I did a quick search to try to find a picture of this, but obviously the interwebs wanna forget about this dark page in our history, too.)  Basically you got tight curls in the back third of your head or so and the rest of the hair was left alone.  It was pretty hideous, but I my eight or nine year old mind was convinced that I had to have it.  So, with a little convincing, I talked my mom in to taking me to have this ridiculousness done to my head.... or at least I thought I had convinced her.  Little did I know, she had already spoken with her friend and they had decided that it wouldn't look right to have just a portion of my head permed, so they decided the whole head needed to be curled to add wave.

This is what I ended up with.....

Now, I'm not saying that my cut would have been better, but at least I wouldn't be able to blame my dear well-intentioned mother for this assault on my dome.  I would've had no one to blame but myself.  The only reason I bring up this miscarriage of authority, is because I'm dealing with it again, over twenty years later. 

After letting my director know that I was looking for a barber, he was very eager to show me to his favorite.  He took me to a place with white washed windows and a seedy exterior... immediately, I thought he had confused the "needs" that I was trying to meet.  Thankfully, there was not a fifty year old scantily clad lady waiting inside.  The director spoke a few words to the man behind the chair and left me to get the cut.  Luckily I had my driver's license to give him an idea of how short I wanted my hair because, like everyone else, he spoke no English.  He went to work with a speed and skill set that I hadn't seen in a long time.  He didn't use clippers at all, and while I admittedly know nothing about giving haircuts, his technique was very impressive.  Then he spun me around to see his work.  It was very clean and there was no noticeable issues, except that it was too long for my taste.  We are coming into the summer months and I haven't really had hair longer than an inch or so for several years, so I wanted to cool off by shearing the locks that had grown since I got here.  I tried to convey this fact:  I made hand signals to show shorter hair, I showed him the picture again, but he just waved his hand and shook his head no.  I gave him the 8000 won (a little less than 8 dollars) and I left the little shop.  It wasn't until the next day that I found out my director had told him to absolutely not cut it too short.  He said it would make me look too much like a gangster.  I'm thirty-two years old and I now have a new Mom to tell the hairdresser how to cut my hair..... FML.