Rebecca: I Place My Fate In the Hands of a Chinese Man (And it Doesn't End Well)

So our wifi's been acting up again, so I'm going to post this whenever possible. I'm writing on Tuesday, May 13. I just realized our trip is halfway over TT_TT. Today was a pretty exciting day, as you can probably tell by the title.

Steven and I had been talking about getting our hair cut at the barbershop on campus for a while, so today we decided to make that a reality. Steven speaks Mandarin, so he translated for me a little, but really I just pointed to how short I wanted it cut and let the guy go wild.

And go wild he did. It was easily the longest haircut session I've ever sat through. The blowdry and style part took longer than the actual cutting of hair. He blowdried every single section separately, then started cutting again, then blowdried again, then sighed and straightened it, then trimmed and blowdried it again. I was pretty sick of sitting in that chair by the end. For a while I thought he was just making excuses to play with my vaguely reddish, non-Asian hair. His colleagues seemed pretty interested in what he was doing, too.

And then I realized he was actually just frustrated. He got out his phone and put something through a translating app, then showed it to me. It read something like "Your hair is too messy. It is too curly. It is not good. You need to straighten it like I did now. Now it is nice". I couldn't really decide whether to laugh or be offended. Excuse me for not having Asian hair!

So anyway, he kept cutting until it was way shorter than I wanted, so now I'm sporting this vaguely Asian take on a bob cut. It's probably not the most flattering haircut I've ever had, but everyone needs at least one bad haircut in their life, so mine might as well come with a funny story attached!

So other than getting my haircut by a man I couldn't communicate with, I didn't do much today. Little bit of shopping, little bit of getting sick, little bit of playing cards. Ate ice cream to recover after The Haircut.

I don't want this trip to be half over. I might just stay here. Although I really want some decent coffee. Not iced coffee in a bottle, not burnt with grinds at the bottom, just good, black coffee. But the tea here is really good, so I guess I'll survive.

-Rebecca