One of the most difficult things to have in Nanjing is a hair cut. This is because no hairdresser speaks English and we don’t have the specialist language to describe what we need done. I just go into a hairdressers and let them do what they want. It works pretty well usually. But then, I’m not so fussy and I don’t need colour so life is easy.
I found a place near the flat where I can get my hair cut and a massage for £2.50 so I use that. I suggested that Sue use it and although they have been cutting her hair a little too short, recently, she seemed pretty happy with them.
But….. this week she decided that, as things were going well with that hairdresser, she would trust them to do a colour. Don’t forget that this a country which can only ever dye their hair brown. It is very difficult if not impossible to get hair dye in any other colour.
So I don’t really know what they used, but she was supposed to have blond highlights. Instead, what they managed to do was peroxide everything. At the end of the process she was horrified to find that she had green hair. She asked them to do something to make it a more normal colour and so God knows what they did but it came out yellowish.
She gave up at this point and came home. When I saw her I was stunned and then laughed a lot. Thankfully she also found it quite amusing and we laughed together. In the morning, knowing that she would turn a lot of heads at school, she decided to try dyeing it with tea. However, this only made it dark green so she rinsed it off, bit the bullet and went to school.
Later in the morning I found her the phone number of a foreigner who was a qualified hairdresser and she spoke to her to see if there was anything she could suggest. It appears there is nothing she can do while she is in China to ectify the situation.
I went to see Sue in school later that day and I saw her walked down the street. She is short but you could spot her a mile off, like a white beacon walking through a crowd of blackness.