Chinese haircut (worth every yuan)

It's the necessities of life, the things that you take for granted, that can just sneak up on you over here and make life, ah, interesting. So it was with my first Chinese haircut. I had delayed things as long as possible. Tomorrow I would be visiting my campus and meeting with faculty and administration, so the hair had to be chopped. The question was, how. Of course, you can just walk into a barber shop, point to your head, and they would more or less figure that you wanted a haircut--there was not even any necessity, really, to learn the term. It's not like you would walk into the barbershop to buy fruit. But the key question was not whether you would get a haircut--you most certainly would--but what kind of haircut you would get.

As the day for the haircut neared I began examining the hair of the people around me and did not like what I saw. The local style, as trendy as in might be, was not for me. It seemed to consist in cutting the hair as close as possible without actually qualifying as a crew cut. At least I knew of acouple of volunteers who had braved the world of the Chinese barber. One had gone with a Chinese speaker for some assistance and one had gone in by himself, and in neither case was I overwhelmed by the results, and in one I was actually a bit frightened. But I could delay no more. I had gotten the location of the barber that the volunteer who had stumbled in on his own had gone to and was determined to make my way there and take my chances when Mrs Z offered to go with me. So with Mr. Z in tow we walked into an area that had a number of barbershops and walked into one pretty much at random, whereupon ensued a converstaion in which Mrs. Z acted as interemediary and I tried to establish some parameters, but by the time I sat down in the chair I had no idea what I would end up with. So it started out with a wash, and then a cut, and then another wash. I tried to keep my eyes closed for most of the cut but I could tell hair was falling out at a rather rapid pace. And by the time he had finished, well, I had certainly gotten my money's worth. Or rather, much more than my money's worth, since the haircut had cost five yuan, or about eighty cents.