curly e

(this post was requested by Sandy:-))

Somewhere in the past few weeks I got really, really tired of my hair. Too long, too difficult to maintain, too all sorts of things that made me think "ugh" every time I looked at it.

So naturally I decided to perm it.

Which is to say that I make drastic decisions about my hair when I'm sick of it. Right before I started college I chopped all of my hair off. Right before I moved to Brooklyn for a summer I got bangs.

We looked for a do-it-yourself perm, but couldn't find one. So I asked one of my friends at church if she would go to the hair salon with me. We agreed on a time to meet and I wrote down the word "perm" for her so she could look it up.

Thursday rolled around and I headed to meet up with her at the church. She ended up not being able to make it and so I left, wondering if I should wait to talk with her again or just throw the translator to the wind and go it on my own.

I was super ready for this hair change to happen and had been looking forward to it all week.

The day before I had looked up the word for "perm" in the office's Mongolian/English dictionary just because I had a feeling it might come in handy, translator or not.

So I decided to just go and see what happened. I chose a hair salon that's in a hotel near our house, since I had seen it before and knew there was a small chance someone there might speak at least a little bit of English.

I walked into the salon and thought "Well, here goes nothing." I had written the Mongolian word for "perm" in my little planner, so I pulled it out and went to the receptionist and showed it to her.

"How much?" she said. I nodded and she told me. I nodded again and then it was off to get my hair washed.

I read while they worked and I smiled when several other employees drifted over to watch the curl-rolling process.

The two hair stylists chatted quietly to each other as they worked, but it was a quiet hair salon, not loud and filled with noise like most hair salons in the U.S. This didn't surprise me, as Mongolians are not particularly chatty people most of the time.

We pantomimed our way through decisions like how big or small I wanted the curls to be and when I needed to get up to have the solution rinsed out or when I needed to sit still and let it dry.

And a little over two hours later, my hair was curly, blown-dry and trimmed.

All thanks to three little Mongolian words that I thought it might be a good idea to write down.

These are not the best pictures, but I can't really write about a haircut and not show some evidence, so they'll have to do:



(side note: my hair is a lot more ringlet-esque now after a few washes)