Dabbling With The Wax And Hairspray Look

Tuesday was a momentous day in the gradual breakthrough from visitor to resident - I got my first Abu Dhabi haircut. Mostly girls and metrosexuals are protective about how their hair is shaped, and by whom, but...

1) I have damn thick hair, cowlick and (most likely) a denty head. I've had many haircuts over the years that I would rate as underwhelming, including the period I lived in Alexandria and had to visit barber shops and all cuts I received from age 6 to 19.

2) The Abu Dhabi service industry is generally far behind my expectations based on 32 years in the U.S. From the apartment facility managers to waiters to cab drivers, communication breakdowns are common, and you're often left not getting what you wanted, or wondering why it took so long to get.

So basically, I feel like I need a slightly-more-complicated-than-you'd-expect haircut to not look like an ass, and I wasn't confident I'd be likely to find a stylist in Abu Dhabi could give it to me.

Long story short, I was very pleased with the cut the gentleman (I think he said his name was Ahmad, but unsurprisingly, I couldn't really understand him) gave me at The lounge. Tight on the side and textured enough on the top to hide my cowlicks.

However, at the end, the male-haircut question came about whether I wanted product in my hair. I usually do a mild form of purposefully messy, so I said yes as I always do. Well not only did he give me the stiff wax, he then topped it off with hairspray. I call it the Romanian soccer player look, and though I could have brushed it down with my hands right away, I wanted to take it home to show Leslie.

The picture above is from my 1 hour walk to and from the haircut. I try to avoid taking cabs whenever possible, both because I have the time to wander, and because there's a decent chance a cab won't be able to get me where I'm going. It doesn't help that there are (literally) no street addresses, they just give you cross streets, and you have to play detectic on the gigantic AD blocks.

In fact, after an hour of trying to locate The Lounge and getting dangerously close to missing my appointment, I did hail a cab. I called the salon, had them give the directions to my driver in Arabic, he drove approximately 75 feet, turned right, and dropped me off by the side of a resident building.

My first reaction was embarrassment that I had made him drive me such a short distance, so I gave him 5 Dirham (about $1.50 US) even though the meter hadn't rang up a charge yet. But of course he dropped me off in the completely wrong place (those of you who thought, when reading point 2 above, that I was being ethnocentric expecting people to be able to communicate in English with me, Arabic-to-Arabic conversations don't seem to achieve better results). I was initially about 100 feet away from my destination, but he took me in the wrong direction.

That's my number one complaint about Abu Dhabi so far. But at least I've found my stylist! Maybe next time I'll go all out and ask for the Rinaldo-hawk, which is very popular amongst the popped-collar sect around here.