Rapunzel Rapunzel let down your, wait, where's the hair?
Got a haircut! It wasn’t what I wanted, despite trying my best to either ask them just for a straight trim (they insisted I do something different) or then trying to explain the simple style I wanted. I wanted to keep my hair long because I’ve been trying to grow it out forever (at least since this past January) so I can chop it all off later and donate it. I need 10-12 inches and my hair just doesn’t grow quickly.
I tried insisting on a trim, but then finally just pointed at a picture (surely it was a magazine pic right out of the 80's) and said I wanted angles in the front and layers in the back. But LONG. Please cut no more than a centimeter or two off of most of my hair and maybe just angles in front (like the picture). My neighbor translated, they had a picture to look at.
Then the main lady (I'll tell you about her in a bit) came, grabbed the front of my hair, and lopped off most of my hair. I thought okay, maybe this will be the bangs and she'll leave the rest of my hair intact. As she worked around my head, she basically cut 6 inches off of everywhere, except one rat tail type thing in the back. So basically, I have a mullet. As AliBob describes it, business in the front and party in the back.
At first I was in shock after seeing all that hair fall into my lap and on the floor and I tried not to cry. I told them I liked it and thank you but maybe my shock was clear on my face, because the lady then pointed to a tiny section of cut hair on the floor (which was, indeed, only a centimeter or so long) and said "see? I didn't cut more than you wanted". I just nodded wondering how stupid she thought I was. Is that supposed to make me feel better? When all the rest of my hair is gone? Or maybe she really did think that's what I wanted and was just exercising creative license.
Anyway, as I sat later on and waited for her to finish with Ms. N, I actually realized I really liked the cut and feel. It’s much shorter than I’ve had in a while (last time it was short was when I cut off my own hair up to my ears, with the help of my dear sister, 4 years ago, and then again 3 years ago). So I suppose the cut's growing on me, just not literally.
The parlor was deep underground and all the ladies were dressed as modernly as any American girl, with tight clothing and stylish hair and makeup. We waited for the main lady who runs the place to arrive. The girls prepared me for her by prewetting and precombing my hair in the desired way ready for cutting and they continued to wet it until she got to the parlor 15 minutes later.
She spent less than 5 minutes on my hair, razored and trimmed it quickly, and handed the scissors to another girl and walked away. They hurriedly finished me off.
When she began working on another lady’s eyebrows, she simply plucked enough to shape them properly for a minute or two, and handed the tweezers off to someone else and left the rest of the residual plucking and threading to her minions.
She then sat down and started chatting away and when the phone rang, even though she was the only person without a customer, she did not answer it and eventually, one of the other girls had to leave her customer and go answer the phone.
Ah to be a person of power in these places. I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of the salon (I really wanted to get the magazine pics they have up) because of her brother owning the place or something. She wasn’t sure if he would approve, although I had fully intended, on my part, to exclude any ladies from the picture to be on the safe side. According to Ms. N (who didn’t get the prohibition either), the lady in charge didn’t care so much about the ladies covering up part, it really was just the fact that her brother might have a problem with it. Whatever. Their loss. When this blog is famous (hah!), they’ll just lose publicity. :)
Anyway, on the walk home after the taxi dropped us off, I took a picture of the little garden areas in our neighborhood. This first one is at the intersection of our street and the main street. It was really bright out so everything seems overexposed (fine, it could be my less than fantastic photography skills):
This next one is of the view of the long road (Khiyabaan-e-Mutaharri) that leads us to the university apartments. The buildings are the last thing before the mountains, as you already know from the picture of my “backyard”.
And finally, here’s a cool little neighborhood park that’s just to the left side of the previous picture. Notice the mountains in the back. What never ceases to amaze me is that Qom is still a desert and this all this greenery is cultivated here. This is probably normal to people living in similar climes but it still always gets me.
I tried insisting on a trim, but then finally just pointed at a picture (surely it was a magazine pic right out of the 80's) and said I wanted angles in the front and layers in the back. But LONG. Please cut no more than a centimeter or two off of most of my hair and maybe just angles in front (like the picture). My neighbor translated, they had a picture to look at.
Then the main lady (I'll tell you about her in a bit) came, grabbed the front of my hair, and lopped off most of my hair. I thought okay, maybe this will be the bangs and she'll leave the rest of my hair intact. As she worked around my head, she basically cut 6 inches off of everywhere, except one rat tail type thing in the back. So basically, I have a mullet. As AliBob describes it, business in the front and party in the back.
At first I was in shock after seeing all that hair fall into my lap and on the floor and I tried not to cry. I told them I liked it and thank you but maybe my shock was clear on my face, because the lady then pointed to a tiny section of cut hair on the floor (which was, indeed, only a centimeter or so long) and said "see? I didn't cut more than you wanted". I just nodded wondering how stupid she thought I was. Is that supposed to make me feel better? When all the rest of my hair is gone? Or maybe she really did think that's what I wanted and was just exercising creative license.
Anyway, as I sat later on and waited for her to finish with Ms. N, I actually realized I really liked the cut and feel. It’s much shorter than I’ve had in a while (last time it was short was when I cut off my own hair up to my ears, with the help of my dear sister, 4 years ago, and then again 3 years ago). So I suppose the cut's growing on me, just not literally.
The parlor was deep underground and all the ladies were dressed as modernly as any American girl, with tight clothing and stylish hair and makeup. We waited for the main lady who runs the place to arrive. The girls prepared me for her by prewetting and precombing my hair in the desired way ready for cutting and they continued to wet it until she got to the parlor 15 minutes later.
She spent less than 5 minutes on my hair, razored and trimmed it quickly, and handed the scissors to another girl and walked away. They hurriedly finished me off.
When she began working on another lady’s eyebrows, she simply plucked enough to shape them properly for a minute or two, and handed the tweezers off to someone else and left the rest of the residual plucking and threading to her minions.
She then sat down and started chatting away and when the phone rang, even though she was the only person without a customer, she did not answer it and eventually, one of the other girls had to leave her customer and go answer the phone.
Ah to be a person of power in these places. I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of the salon (I really wanted to get the magazine pics they have up) because of her brother owning the place or something. She wasn’t sure if he would approve, although I had fully intended, on my part, to exclude any ladies from the picture to be on the safe side. According to Ms. N (who didn’t get the prohibition either), the lady in charge didn’t care so much about the ladies covering up part, it really was just the fact that her brother might have a problem with it. Whatever. Their loss. When this blog is famous (hah!), they’ll just lose publicity. :)
Anyway, on the walk home after the taxi dropped us off, I took a picture of the little garden areas in our neighborhood. This first one is at the intersection of our street and the main street. It was really bright out so everything seems overexposed (fine, it could be my less than fantastic photography skills):
This next one is of the view of the long road (Khiyabaan-e-Mutaharri) that leads us to the university apartments. The buildings are the last thing before the mountains, as you already know from the picture of my “backyard”.
And finally, here’s a cool little neighborhood park that’s just to the left side of the previous picture. Notice the mountains in the back. What never ceases to amaze me is that Qom is still a desert and this all this greenery is cultivated here. This is probably normal to people living in similar climes but it still always gets me.
posted by Irfan Ali at 3:54 PM
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