What I have learned today

I learned something new today – you should never get blonde highlights put in your hair in a country where - a) the majority of the people have thick dark flowing locks and b) the majority of the hairdressers (read all) have thick dark hair. C) Where there is an enormous communication gap between hairdresser and client. Big Mistake! You will end up looking like a Barbie doll that was dropped in bleach. I guess I should have known “natural” doesn’t carry the same fashionable tone here anyway. One of my Arabic students had commented one time how colour was so popular in makeup in the ME and how quickly they learned to tone it down for us more demure Aussies. “We’re like rainbows” she told me. So whilst the hairdressing salon staff, and there were many of them, tried to convince me that my hair looked great and she had once done the same colour to an American woman and she loved it. I took a little more convincing. I knew to prepare myself as after her first failed attempt she told me in broken English as my hair was being washed - “I fix it. Madame, I am ashamed”. Not the words you want to hear from your hairdresser. So, now I am stuck at home whilst I learn to improvise on making my own headbands. I also learned that just because a place is called London Beauty Salon doesn’t mean there is any connection whatsoever to London anything. At least I was allowed to spend extra time observing the curious happenings of the local beauty salon where the local women cast off their burqas. (Well, some even here in this environment left their burqas, niqab and Pradas on to have their pedicure or get their threading (the most popular treatment by far). So interesting to watch. As the Filipino and Thai hairdressers and beauty therapists scream and laugh loudly at each other from all corners of the room. Such camaraderie between these women, shipped like cargo lots to this far away land to sleep, eat and work at the salon. How much fun they seem to make of what must be difficult circumstances. Probably laughing at my hair. As I write Andrew is off to have an “Arabic cut” facial shave at the local barbers with a knife. That might be tomorrow’s post.