vacation: the haircut

i had an amazing two week vacation that ended about a week ago. i haven't written anything about yet because...where to start? i did post a lot of pictures elsewhere that you may have already seen. but i guess here is the place to tell the stories in a few more details. since i don't know where to begin, according to the pictures, the haircut was basically first, so i'll start with that.

but actually, before that, the beginning of the vacation was when my friend alissa arrived in china!
we spent a couple days doing things around the city where i live, before beginning some travels around china. this is us at a shopping area near a temple in downtown. we had a bus adventure that day, because we got on a bus that we thought was going towards my house, but then it made a loop and was going the other direction! but then it did another weird loop and was actually going towards my house...so good thing we just stayed on. they need to put route maps in more of these busses!!

anyway, the haircut. i've been wanting to get my hair cut for awhile, at least a trim. i did get it trimmed once at a chinese haircutting place here (we call it "the purple place" because of the huge purple sign on the outside of it). they charged me more to do that than they charged my friends who they gave layers to, etc... maybe it's because they think my curly hair is so weird?? but really, all they did was trim straight across the bottom. and based on my friend's experience getting layers in her curly hair from that day, i wasn't inclined to try the same thing. i've had the same hairstyle for ages, and i felt that it was time for a change, but i didn't want the change to be a chinese style haircut with really short layers in the front and really long layers in the back, which would have looked really weird in my hair anyway. charis and i, who don't know all that much about our own hair, started researching online how curly hair should be cut, and the more we read, the more we were convinced that the chinese people who we would go to would really just have no idea what they were doing, even if we could describe to them in perfect chinese what they should do. so our determination to get a haircut was discouraged.

but, charis's wonderful sister, betsy, was coming to visit at the same time that my friend alissa was coming, arriving just a couple days later. betsy has had experience cutting hair, and has curly hair herself. so betsy agreed to cut our hair while she was here, and we agreed to let her.

as an introduction, here is us (seth (charis's brother), charis, betsy, and me) out on an adventure around town, practicing our chinese squat while we rest to have a snack.
this is a normal way to hang out for a lot of chinese people. charis and betsy are best at it. it's supposed to be done flat-footed (from our observations), and you can kinda tell from this picture that i'm not so good at it because my feet are turned to the side.

anyway, the hair. let's see, the last time i had my hair short was in 8th grade. that makes about 13 years of letting my hair grow and just trimming it and not really cutting it any shorter. eek. this is why it was time for a change. maybe moving to china inspired me. but i think what really inspired me was betsy. for some reason i felt i could trust her, maybe because i already knew charis, and i also already had heard a lot of things about betsy. but if you ever meet betsy, she just seems like a very trustworthy person almost immediately, unlike other people in the past who have wanted to "play with" or "experiment" with my hair, she actually just wanted to give me a haircut that i would like and that she thought would look good. perfect.

so this is her preparing to cut my hair in my house.
i gave her a sheet to wear so that she wouldn't get hair all over herself. she wore it as a toga, of course.

ahhh my hair being cut!!
we cut off enough at once so that alissa could take it back to the US and give it to locks of love for me.
it felt really weird for her to cut it all off!! now it seems normal to have short hair, and really kind of nice. there are actually so many more things i can easily do with it now that it is short. whether or not i am un-lazy enough to do them is another story. but the possibility is there! and just the fact that it is different now and i like it is pretty great.

betsy cut charis's hair too, of course.
charis's had to be fixed later, so it doesn't look as awesome as it does in this picture after betsy fixed the layers in charis's hair. she gave us both the same haircut at first, but the haircut that worked on me didn't work as well on charis.

anyway, yay for short hair!! the beginning of an adventuresome vacation. and oh, there is so much more to come!