Copper

My passport expires in January and there’s no way I can use the current one with so little time left. I think it has to have at least three months left on it. Anyway, the time to renew is now so that I have my new one in time for travel at the end of next month. Before I can renew, I need the all important photo done and so I decided it was time again to get my hair cut. I think the last cut I had was in January just before I got my new driver’s license. Seems the photo requirements are the motivating factor for me to get on to getting hair cuts. :)

I made an appointment for Friday with intentions of a colour job and cut. I did colour my hair with a home kit a while back and it came out pretty well but it didn’t stay the purple for all that long. I think part of the problem is I didn’t take the best care of it and it faded fairly quickly. Exposure to pool water was also a problem. I need to get a cap to wear over my hair at the pool so this doesn’t happen again.

I arrived a bit early for the appointment and there was just the woman I’d seen the day before when making the booking, and a guy who turned out to be the hairdresser. I was surprised because the shops I have gone to haven’t had male hairdressers. In fact I thought it was the first time I’d had a guy do my hair but then I recalled the time when I must have been a teen that my mom took me to a barber to get a perm. I don’t know why that happened that way and it was all weird. But it was a man who did my hair at that time…so not the first time. :)

Anyway, I had to wait for a bit for the guy to finish up with the previous client but was able to sit in the chair for the duration. It wasn’t that long before he got to me and so we discussed what I wanted done. He had a strong accent which seemed European in origin but his English was pretty good. I shouldn’t be surprised by this since English is so widely spoken there.  Our first discussion was about the colour I wanted. I asked about going with some sort of purple but he steered and persuaded me to a copper/brown combination which he thought would work better. Then he was gone again for a while to mix up the dyes.

The process of putting the dye on my hair took quite a while to do, longer than I expected. He was quite methodical with his work and it eventually did get done and then I was waiting the thirty minutes for the colour to set while he did someone else’s cut. The next client was a nine-year old girl who had long hair and was getting it cut off.

I spent my waiting time playing games on my phone and occasionally watched the progress with the little girl’s cut. The hairdresser was meticulous with his work on her hair too. When he finished it looked good and was quite cute. Someone else came for a cut during this time and he started on that and soon it was already thirty minutes and I was still sitting. It must have been about forty-five minutes by the time the woman took me off to rinse and treat my hair. Then there was the five-minute wait for the treatment to work. Which was really more like 10-15 minutes, lol…there seemed to be a pattern about the whole place.

He did get back to me and then we had a look at the colour and it really did look nice. The most obvious change was at the roots where he’d put just the copper. Our next step was the hair cut and I gave him license to use his own judgement as to how much to cut. I was happy to lose a fair bit but wanted to keep it below shoulder length. I think he must have cut about three inches or more. Finally all the dry and damaged hair was gone and it looked much better already. He then went on to the blow dry and I thought that would go a bit more quickly but I was wrong again. It was around this time that our conversation picked up a bit and I learned that he had only just moved here, apparently from Italy, and he’s still working on getting things he needs for his day to day living. He said that situation here is much better than in Italy, where it’s hard to make a living and afford basic necessities. All the time we were talking, he would stop regularly from the work to speak and then start working again.

When he finished everything, it really did look nice and healthy again. The colour turned out really well too. I must make a better effort at getting cuts a bit more regularly so that I don’t have so much damage at the end of my hair.

Once I paid, I collected the boys from the library next door (they’d been waiting for over two hours in the end) and then I rushed off to get my photo done at the camera shop in the same complex. That part took very little time but it was late enough I didn’t have time to get to the bank for the cashier’s check for the fees and to the post office to post to the consulate. Instead I decided to wait for Monday when I had more time. Instead we headed off to do our shopping for the week and only just got home a bit after six in the end.