The extremely long saga of my haircut

 We're in Istanbul, and my hair has been getting bushy. Tova's haircut yesterday was rather successful (e.g., a boy gave her a flower and told her he loved her in the playground later that day), so I decided I should get a haircut too.

I asked the friendly, Jeeves-like man at our favourite restaurant (Ziya Baba, fantastic lentil soup) where to go. He directed me across the street, assuring me this is where he gets his hair cut. He patted his hair modestly as he said this, and indeed it was looking pretty good.

So I head in (ha ha) and a guy sits me down in a chair. He doesn't speak English, and waves away my broken words of Turkish. We get started. He begins by dominating my hair. He tugs it, yanks it, pushes it all down then pulls it back up roughly. A series of light smacks to both sides of my head, and a circular rubbing motion on my temples. Am I getting a massage? Is this a sumo type ritual?

But soon enough he sets to, and my hair gets neater and neater. Sure, he prefers to just blow powerful gusts of breath over me rather than use a hair dryer, but that's fine. My perennially annoyed back starts getting achy, but it's all good, he's just doing the finishing touches.

Or is he? Suddenly my head is thrust back onto a way-back-headrest, and he brings out a straight razor. "No shave, no shave," I say. He chuckles. "No shave! Just this!" He scrapes at my sideburns. I relax. Then he grabs my mouth in his hand and scraaaapes my lips with his razor. Pulls a nostril up and scraaapes inside like a PCR swab. Then the other one. He pinches my nose shut, pulls it up, and scraaapes along the underside of my nose.

Whew! He's going away. But soon he returns with the other barber. They are considering my neck, where I have had a wart for at least twenty years. They discuss and nod to each other. "I am doctor," says the second guy. They both chuckle. I close my eyes and lean back. A sharp pain, and he triumphantly places my wart on the table. They fetch some paper for my neck.

OK, what an interesting exp - oh, wait, there's more. My barber looks closely at my left cheekbone, then smears it with something extremely hot. Feels like honey, but it's wax. I end up with hot wax on both cheeks, in both my ears, on my eyelids, all done my nose. He uses wax to sculpt my eyebrows. Is this what happens to women at salons?

While I am helpless beneath my coating of wax, doctor-barber is summoned again. They have found the small, like, you couldn't even call it a wart, beside my left eye. One barber fetches a straight razor, the other a lighter. Flames are held incredibly close to my eye. A sharpness, and then a second trophy is added to our collection. 

They are all smiles. The barber starts tearing off the sheets of wax. I am irrationally afraid my entire eyelid will come off, but am also proud to withstand the wax-pain that I've read about. Barber #1 applies the lighter to my ear, melting off the last traces of wax, while Barber #2 beams and blows on my head. I breathe a sigh of relief, which is abruptly cut off as four (count 'em!) Q-tips impregnated with molten wax are stuffed into my nostrils, plugging them completely.

It is at this point, unfortunately, that my body starts to shut down. I get anxiety sometimes, and as my back begins to well and truly hurt, plus shallow-breaths through my waxed mouth, my vision starts to go black. My Turkish vocabulary, unfortunately, doesn't extend to words like "dizzy" or "faint". Fortunately, the ashen colour of my face, and my English sentence fragments, alerts the barber that all is not well. He hastily removes the Q-tips, anoints me with aftershave, pats me down, and within moments I'm lying on their futon, being offered 'calming medicine' and water. "Tension! Tension!" they say, miming stress. The doctor points at the bloody warts and polluted strips of wax, and grins sympathetically.

Within two minutes I feel much better, give them all the money I have on me, assure them this has been the most interesting haircut I've ever had, and flee to recuperate. Back at our apartment, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and stop short. My skin is smoother, my rat-tail of a right eyebrow has been tamed, my neck could be used in deodorant ads. If only I hadn't almost fainted, I'd be an adonis by now. 

The moral of the story is, going to Istanbul is worth it just for Ziya Baba's lentil soup and the barbershop across the street - as long as you can handle it. I barely could.

Tova trying to figure out what to do about the boy

Tova later proclaimed, "I do not like love experiences!"

Left pale by the barbers