email: haircut

Subject: haircuts
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:29:54 +0000
dear mom and dad,

225 today! yeah! i attribute it to the v8 and coke zero. classes are going well. the students are great. they've actually become really comfortable with asking me for money all the time. i guess the other teachers sometimes buy their kids candy and other such treats. i tell my students that im concerned for their dental hygiene and cannot in good conscious buy them candy. when they persist, i use the good old cur------ trick of, "Ok, Wait right there." :)

im learning new things here everyday... peter, a friend of mine who's been here 3 years and in need of a haircut schooled me on barber shops here. the standard red/white/blue spinning poles is where you can pretty much only get the standard korea haircut: hair parted to the side, snip snip short. if you want more of a stylist, then you need to look for the spinning barber shop poles with pictures of women on them. now the interesting thing: if you see dual spinning barber shop poles spinning side by side, then it means you can get a haircut as well as a sensual massage. peter told me he learned this... uhm.. .the hard way. he went in for a haircut and when finished, the guy asked peter if he wanted a massage for 30,000 won. not wanting to pass up a good deal, he says yes. he's directed into a smaller room where the woman tells him to take all his clothes off and lies down. being that peter had only been in korea about a month at the time, he figured it was just a "korean thing."

"so she starts massaging me..." peter says, "and then she gets closer and closer to the danger zone!"
"oh my gosh, what did you do?"
"nothing, i wanted her to go on with what she was doing!"

he told me that at that point the woman asked for an additional 70,000 won, when peter realized that this woman was business, not some lovely korean woman hot for the white foreigner. when he told his friends about it later, they explained to him what a rip off it is, b/c the woman never actually fellates the penis, just strokes it and puts her mouth on it to make it LOOK like a bj.

"they block your view with their hair," he explained.

uhm, ok, good to know! ~sha