It’s been a great joy while moving around to experience the creative, resourceful ways that people find to cut my hair. Haircuts abroad create connections because they force us to sit calmly with someone from a different culture, and to trust them. Highly recommended for the stories, although not always for the final product. My top 5 haircuts of the last 2 years:
5. Dakar, Senegal: Getting a buzz at a tin shack powered by a wire run down from a nearby telephone pole. The neighborhood power cuts when only half my head is finished, so we agree to finish tomorrow. I’ve walked about 100 feet down the road, thinking about how to explain my half-cut at work the next day, when – miracle of miracles!- the power comes back, and he does the other half.
4. Kathmandu, Nepal: The guy spends a good hour styling me up, and then proceeds to give me the most vigorous unrequested head and neck massage of all time. At one point he was just punching the top of my head.
3. Lagos, Nigeria: Lagos is full of nighttime roadside barbers who nail a mirror to a wall and hang a couple bare bulbs. I finally decide to patronize one and am highly rewarded with the barber crooning R&B to me, several of his friends showing up to take videos of the event, and a full round of selfies at the end. This one is the cover photo of this post.
2. Mumbai, India: I see a tiny, wise-looking old man down a side street, and he uses a single pair of scissors and a straight razor to give me the cleanest low-skin-fade I’ve ever gotten. Most likely to be a wizard of anyone on this list.
1. Lusaka, Zambia: I wander into a place at the edge of Kalingalinga late at night. They start buzzing me and another customer, then the power cuts. The staff run out, and the customer and I wait in the silent pitch-dark for a few minutes. Then the staff come back, revealing with laughs that they’ve filled up a generator at the petrol pump across the road, turn the power back on, and finish our cuts. All good vibes, and good reminders that this life is special.