Barber Shop Adventures
So, here I am going
to get another haircut in Ethiopia. My own hair clippers got fried by the 220
volt Ethiopian electrical outlet, so only one choice left. The sign out front
has a huge photo of Will Smith and there is another with rapper “Ludichris” and
a white British-looking guy with an early 1990’s style cut. “I’ll have the Will
Smith,” I say to him. No response. The
barber looks at me and motions to sit down. Then he puts on an orange road
safety vest and prepares to cut my hair. Then I notice that there are about
twenty kids sitting behind me watching the movie Titanic on a little crappy old T.V.. This barber shop doubles as
the world’s worst movie theatre and DVD
rental shop. This is just the tip of it.
I didn’t expect
getting a haircut to be such an adventure. It seems like a simple thing. Something
I never expected about Ethiopia is the modernness of the barber shops. Like so
many other aspects of modern society here, Westernism and technologies have recently
caught on like wildfire. Most all Ethiopian barber shops now cut hair by
electric clippers, and have a similar setup to American shops. Ethiopian men
love to get haircuts. They like their hair short and neat, so barber shops are
busy places. In our little town of 3,000 there are at least seven barber shops,
and that is just for men.
Despite the insisting of my language teacher that I would
contract a deadly disease from the hair trimmers, my first Ethiopian haircut
went great. A Simple shave of the beard and took a little of the top. The next
one, though, was more interesting. I convinced myself that the popular
Ethiopian chinstrap look was for me. It didn’t quite turn out like the #7
picture of the cool Ethiopian dude on the barber’s wall. Instead I looked
something like a Backstreet Boys reject (see photo). That haircut took almost
two hours. Some barbers here think they are Michealangelos. They keep taking
little microwiskers off here and there like my face is going to be in some art
competition.
And then there is the spot of hair at the top corner of the
temples. No one can give a haircut without cutting that spot off. It’s like
they are a doctor thinking it is a re-occuring tumor- THAT PATCH OF TEMPLE HAIR
MUST BE THE FIRST TO GO, ALWAYS. I have no idea why.
Why did this second barber just take over for the first one
and re-do my haircut? Did he understand anything I just said? Is this hair
trimmer going to break in mid-stroke and cut up my face? Should I duct-tape a
hat to my head this time so they will know to ONLY shave my beard? These are
the questions I am commonly asking myself.
After
hour number one in the un-godly neck-supportless chairs I am always ready to
go. But, NOO. No way I am leaving till I get the most aggressive warm wet towel
face rub they can muscle. The towel is rubbed so hard it exfoliates my skin.
And then Alcohol spash and a bit of lotion sometimes followed by a spray of
Cologne. And every haircut has to have cotton swabs put in my ears. “What?
What’s that? I can’t hear you with these cotton balls jammed in my ear canal.”
I probably wouldn’t know what you were saying anyway. No offense.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is nice treatment. I would
rather have this than a lazy hatchet hair job. But what the barbers never seem
to understand is that a human neck (at least my wimpy American one) is only meant
to take so much bending backwards before life starts to become pain. When you
figure in that the average haircut here costs about $.30 cents in American dollars;
it makes a $20.00 American haircut seem like the financial scam of the century.
Last time I went into a more upscale city barbershop and
just wanted a beard shave and NO HAIRCUT. I thought I was very clear about
that. But 90 minutes later I emerged with a buzz cut and a sharp looking
goatee. This barber knew what I wanted more than I did. He was hell bent on
that goatee. No smiles, no chit-chat, just business. And it did look pretty
good. I also got a thorough scalp and neck message. All of this for under $1.00
US money. Try to top that in America.
