testmeat photoblog

it's been said by people before me that one of the scariest experiences you can have while travelling in a foreign country is going for a haircut. unless you're fluent in the local language there's the concern that your words may be misinterpreted and you end up with a disaster on top of your head. i shared in this fear, waited until i was in bolivia for my first cutting, and the results were fairly disastrous. in fact i shaved it all off when i crossed the border into peru, although there were five months between those two events, so it wasn't exactly a pressing concern. regardless, i would generally agree with the assertion that the overseas haircut is pretty scary, but when i thought it through i reasoned that it's not so bad. i mean you're in front of a mirror so you can see what's happening. even with basic language skills you can still point and say the word no. and at the end of the day, it's just hair, it can grow back or be shaved off. i had this epiphany whilst i was experiencing something much, much scarier than the foreign haircut... the foreign trip to the dentist. there is no mirror, there are no means of communicating once everything gets started, and teeth don't grow back. all i could see was a dentist picking up medieval looking instruments, adding and removing blood-soaked cotton from my mouth, and then dropping teeth into a metal bowl. and when you can hear but not see the scraping, buzzing, whizzing tools your imagination runs wild. perhaps it's unconventional advice but if your scared of something, i say you should force yourself to do something even scarier, to put the first situation into perspective. sure i'm now missing four teeth - but i can go to the hairdressers anywhere in the world.

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