Barber Shop Adventures

 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.