Lost in translation

When you have lived abroad for over 10 years you are bound to encounter a number of occasions when no matter how hard you try or how clear you think you have made yourself, things get lost in translation. Yesterday I had one of those experiences when I visited the hairdresser for the first time in Morocco.

I have never had a high maintenance hair style and am pretty happy with a haircut and highlights once every five or six months, but when you live in a country where your communication skills are limited to hand gestures, a visit to a hairdressers can become an intensely stressful experience.

What makes it worse is I usually find myself in a country where I am surrounded by people with coarse, dark hair; the complete opposite to mine. No big deal until you request highlights from hairdressers used to needing to use high strength bleach for an hour to get any colour difference. Knowledge of this means that sitting down in the hairdresser's chair is akin to going to the dentist. Only the results can be more traumatic and for all to see.

Surprisingly, my luck with hairdressers has been reasonably good. The number of times I’ve sat sweating and biting my nails in a hairdresser's chair in Thailand panicking that my description of how thick I want my highlights using language normally used to choose noodles for soup has not been understood. You spend an uncomfortable hour running through a constant stream of questions of such as 'is it going to be light enough? Is it going to be too light? Is turning orange? Is it going to fall out?' This is the continuous cycle in your brain until the hair-dryer starts to do it's work and all questions are answered one way or another. Thankfully in Thailand I was usually okay. There was the occasional garish orange tint and one slightly green week, but nothing I couldn't deal with.

Yesterday's experience was my most stressful yet. Having asked for highlights and demonstrated the thickness, required use of foils and area to be highlighted with hand gestures and Nick's basic knowledge of hairdresser French, I was left alone while Nick went to do the shopping, wonderful husband that he is.

It started well, the girl doing the foils seemed to know what she was doing and my stress eased. She had obviously understood exactly what I wanted with unprecedented speed. It was only after the front sides of my hair had been done and she started on the very back that I realised that I was getting a whole head of highlights. This I accepted without comment, I’m not fussy, and it's cheap. However, when after 40 minutes of the front of my head sitting in bleach and the top of my head was still not in foils I began to panic. Half of my head was well and truly cooked, while to other half hadn't even been started. I sat and panicked about this for about ten minutes, just how were they going to solve this problem? Surely at best I was going to end up with an orange crown and hair loss at the front. I am ashamed to say that while I can understand quite a lot of French, when speaking I am is still limited to being able to ask for a glass of water and that's about it. I was stuck with my stress in silence.

At the point when another hairdresser came over to check one of the front foils and she asked him something in Moroccan and he responded 'safi' meaning 'done', I watched her start to share my panic. She had obviously underestimated the speed with which my hair stripped itself. You know it's bad when two hair dressers start frantically inspecting your hair and whispering words behind your head. I didn't understand a word of the Arabic spoken, I just felt their panic accelerate mine. It was then that I began to text Nick and warn him to expect the worst. My luck had run out and I was going to lose hair. There would be tears. Why oh why do I always choose to live in a country where the majority of the people can't understand a word I’m saying?

Having prepared Nick for disaster, I think he was quite surprised when sometime later I arrived at the car with probably the best hair cut and colour I’ve had in a long time. This was partly to do with the miracle of a wet towel used to strip the bleach off the overcooked hair while the other hair got to catch up, and partly because the male hairdresser who arrived to cut my newly washed and unconditioned hair (they don't use it here) had little patience for de tangling and simply combed as far as his frustration would allow before cutting off the rest.

This experience reminded why I only visit a hairdresser's once every six months. Time to start flying home for haircuts perhaps?