www.davynextdoor.com

Tokyo is a trendy place. You walk around the city, or even just campus, on any day and you can tell that people put a decent amount of time and effort into the way they look. Japanese guy’s haircuts are generally long (compared to American’s) and just generally really awesome looking. I’ve always wanted to grow my hair out but my hair is so curly that once it gets to a certain point it starts to look really dumb and the curls just beg to be cut off. To keep a really boring story short(er) Christina ended up straightening my hair last week as a semi-joke and once we both realized it looked better I decided to take a chance and go pay for a serious haircut at the place where she went a few weeks before.

This was my first time ever paying for a haircut. For the entirety of my life mostly my Mom has cut my hair with the occasional cut thrown in from a friend or Michael. I was immediately pretty dang nervous when I entered the place. Christina was translating everything for me while they stared at my hair and assessed the situation. They brought us a book of different styles (all of which were full of long, Japanese haircuts) which I looked at with a huge, dumb expression on my face like “I have absolutely no idea.” Eventually Christina and the hair cutting people agreed on one they thought would look good. As I’ve basically had the same curly, simple haircut my entire life and have no clue what would look good on me I agreed to what the professionals suggested and the process began.

For the whole hour or so throughout the haircut, shampoo, blow dry, straighten, and putting wax in my hair process I had the most nervous and embarrassed look on my face. The employees were extremely nice, but while Christina was carrying on a conversation with them in Japanese, drinking the free tea they provided her, and being complimented on how cute she is and how well she speaks Japanese I was worrying about how stupid I was going to look when it was all done. When it was over I stared at it for a while like “uhhhhhhhh” finally saying the equivalent of “I’m okay with it” and “It’s sooooo different” in Japanese, but clearly looking concerned.

I think I’ve mostly gotten over the initial shock factor and I’m really pretty happy with the way it turned out. After class today Christina and I walked around trying to find a decent spot right by campus for a picture. We ended up finding a nice plain backdrop in a decently crowded office building that had really confused looking Japanese people walking by us fairly often. Thanks a ton Christina for taking the picture and for helping me so much with all this hair nonsense!

This is a fairly intense picture, I hope nobody is too scared or takes this too seriously