Not your average haircut... In Oman

That haircut…

SO I decide to go and get a haircut from my local friendly Indian haircutter in downtown Muscat. I knew haircuts by Indians for Indians are usually cheap and having seen this same barber cut the hair of a local Omani I figured he must have some sort of following. Following schmollowing, how wrong I was.

So I take my place asking for an 8 on top and 3 on back and sides. Pretty simple stuff you see, can’t really go wrong there. Man retorts in broken Engerlish: ‘SOLDJER KUT’(said in deep Indian accent)… erm, that’s not how I like to refer to it sir, but if you insist. Perhaps his vision of an 8-3 wildly differs from mine…

Things aren’t going too bad, I mean how much can you mess up with clippers? Not a lot. But things start getting a bit weird when Mr Barber’s face cleaning brush (y’kno, from all the hair etc) is not some soft-caressing type, but you rough-n’-rugged home DIY brush, with everlasting bristles. Ok, forgiven for this one.

Having cut the hair on my neck, this barber, who seems to love using this diy brush for everything, decides to use his brush on my recently shaved neck! NO SIR! What are you doing using a thick-evil-bristle-brush on my now-baby-soft-recently wounded neck? Idiot me just kept these comments to myself of course. Throughout Mr Barber pulls out his little spray can, usually a little bottle used to wet hair by spray, every few minutes and drenches my face more than my hair, seemingly getting silent pleasure out of it watching me squirm. And just when I think that my head is going to feel the cool breeze of a hair dryer Mr Barber decides to use the best tools available to man, his hands! I tell you guys, I didn’t half enjoy having my head frantically shaken as if to produce the same effect as a hair dryer. With my feathers thoroughly ruffled I, thinking of you, readers, and decide to ask for a shave because, surely, that would spice up an already good blog-post.

Now just a little note… I’m not even sure he would have understood me had I protested at this brutal treatment. This man’s language capacity (compromised already) was clearly spread 50/50 between Arabic and English… but with an already limited capacity split in half, the man was no communication wizard.

And now to the shave. Again this plant-pot sprayer comes out and my face is drenched. Mr Barber starts rubbing water into my facial hair. He spends over 5 mins doing this. What?! How on earth could rubbing water into a face help it pre-shave? So, beginning to panic at this random human-being’s haphazard techniques, I demand he uses shaving foam and a new razor. Fair enough, you would have thought. And what does he use to spread the foam on my face? One of those things you use to spread PolyFilla to seal a wall gap… that’s right, a plastic brush (brush was plastic). My confidence in this man was beginning to get somewhat stretched. Then comes the shave itself… done fairly well I might add (my conclusion, until I notice the wounds)… For the wounds he brings out this strange translucent round shaped thing (remember no glasses worn) and begins to frantically rub it against my face. Surely not the thing to do when I’ve got a now heavily wounded pizza face?! For some reason he picks a spot on my neck and frantically rubs it with his magic stone… this part of my neck is soft and it rubs against my trachea (wind pipe)… so Mr Barber had a good laugh watching me, freshly diced, choking in his chair.

And to round this all off, out comes that bloody plant-spray to drench my face.

So, all this for 1.70 sterling…

No surprise then, you’d probably say.