I'm back for a while- full throttle

I realize I’ve been quite, quite remiss in updating my journals of late. I apologize (to whom I apologize, I’m not really sure. I like to imagine I have a few quiet, faithful readers out there somewhere.) These last 40 some-odd days have been quite busy and action-packed, but I have diligently kept detailed notes and observations in the interim. We might backtrack a ways here and there, but I’ll be sure to get all the good, juicy stuff in here without any horrible memory lapses. So…shall we?



A while back I visited a barber’s shop with the middle school teacher, Peter, who’s on my service bus everyday. He lifts weights everyday after school at the big, expensive gym across the street from my apartment. He takes every Wednesday off to rest, so on the way home he suggested we go get our hair cut at the ‘kuafor.’ Having quite long and unmanageable hair, I agreed, but I only intended to get a centimeter or two taken off. Peter warned me that a trip to the barber here might be a little different from what I was used to back home, but he didn’t mention any specifics beforehand.



We found this one place with lots of awards and medals on the wall, so it looked reputable enough. We went in, sat down, and Peter was on my right. The hair washing itself was normal enough, but everything after that was quite different from the norm. The hairwashing fellow wallow waled away and another man walked up from behind me and started massaging my head. The massage continued down my neck and to my shoulders, and this was no lightweight massage. He was stimulating some deep tissue here. He proceeded to move back up to my head, but then he made his way down to my forehead, eye sockets, and the rest of my face. It was relaxing enough, but I was wondering what they were going to do to me next.



Another fellow with scissors went to work on me next. He gave me a slight trim, buzzed off the little hairs at the bottom of my neck, and he offered to give me a shave, but I declined. I thought his work was done, but he wasn’t. He grabbed an oversized Q-tip soaked in some kind of liquid off the counter in front of me. I’m thinking, where’s he gonna stick that thing? Is he gonna rub something on me? He whipped a zippo lighter out of his side pocket and proceeded to light the giant Q-tip on fire while holding it in his hand. At this point, my body tensed up and I started looking around for help, or at least some kind of explanation. I say, “Peter???”, but he’s off in some sort of trance and doesn’t hear me.



In the flash of an eye, the barber whips the flame into my ear, singeing the hair in my ear, and jerks it back out before my nerves have the time to react. Whoo, that was a close one, I thought. But then he whips it back in the same ear and pulls it back out again, burning whatever hair was left after the first go-around. The smell in my nose at this point was the pleasant aroma of burnt hair. The last time I smelled that was when I burnt some hair off my arm while attempting to light the grill on my back porch last summer when a fireball flew out of the BBQ. I certainly don’t rank the aroma up there with freshly baked brownies and recently cut grass.



The barber walked behind me and did his little ear hair flame trick on the other ear. It didn’t hurn and he didn’t burn me, but when you look ahead in the mirror and watch some guy throw a small flame into your ear, it’s hard not to get uncomfortable. I couldn’t smell anything but burnt hair for the rest of the night- the odor just refused to leave me.



Peter treated me to the haircut, and afterwards he took me out to dinner. On the way to the restaurant I asked him why he didn’t get the flame treatment as well. He told me got a haircut a few years ago before going to the airport where the guy actually burned him inside his ear. After he left the barber, he felt something hurting inside his ear. On his way to the airport, he reached inside with a finger and found a bunch of puss from the burn. So, obviously, he passes on that barbershop experience nowadays. I’m just glad he didn’t tell me that story before I went in there.