Yesterday I spent five hours at the hairdresser's, trying desperately to make something decent out of a very bad hair situation. A student of mine from the evening class, Liu Ying, took me and Griselle to the best (supposedly) salon in Baoding. I really didn't know quite what I wanted done, but was thinking of just having a nice cut, but the bloke who was to be my hairdresser had his mind set up on a different style and would not give up. His idea was to kind of twist the hair into little curls, so it would look kinda messy and chopped in the end. So after thirty minutes of discussion, I gave in and let him have his way. (He kept saying that he would not do anything else, and that it's his order to do it like this.) By that time, he had also promised me highlights for free.
During the whole process I was terrified, as I had no idea what he really was doing, the explanation had not been too clear, at least in the translation. But it all took so long that at some point I stopped being scared and was just plain bored. In the end, what turned out to be the difficult part was the highlights. The hair dye they were using was meant for Asian hair and is probably somewhat different, and the colour that was supposed to take 15 minutes, had no effect whatsoever on my hair after an hour. So they kept trying…again and again. In the end, I'd had enough and told them to just forget it. I'm reasonably happy with the end result though, at least it's better than before :)

On Friday we had a little Thanksgiving dinner at my place, as we have a couple of Americans around. It was Griselle, Bishi and me, Juan & Bob and Beth, Ken and their kids. Everyone brought something to eat, we even had Beijing duck for the meat eaters (local substitute for the turkey). On Saturday I went bowling with Juan, it had been a while since I'd done that the last time. It was good fun, actually, something different for a change instead of just watching movies, which is what we usually end up doing.

Today after the morning class I went over to Zhao Hui Feng's flat (a student of mine), also in the Zhuguang compound. I stayed until lunchtime and hung around when she was cooking, I’m trying to pick up some tips for cooking Chinese food. She was also helping me with my Chinese...I'm learning... Her husband and son came home for lunch, like they do every day. All offices and schools normally have two hours off for lunch, which allows people to go home to eat. And the women, of course, have to cook the meal. And of course, these days the women normally have another job outside the home, too. And while the women cook and clean at home, the husbands and sons are sleeping or watching TV. Zhao Hui Feng, for example, is a teacher at AUH, but also a PhD student, in addition to having to do all the housework.

The male members of the family were silent during lunch, the husband as he doesn't speak English and the kid, because he was shy. The silence only goes for not speaking, though, their eating habits produced quite a lot of noise, actually. All this slurping and smacking, sllrrpppp-mmmmm-chuurp. But it was a nice lunch, and the food was good. And Zhao Hui Feng is the sweetest person, always willing to help me out with anything.

In the afternoon I went shopping with a couple of other girls. We were looking for jeans, and when we went into the first shop, and the shop assistant saw me, she went into complete hysterics, giggling and shouting, and totally unable to control herself. She wanted to shake my hand, and when she tried to explain what kind of jeans they had, she couldn't do it and ended up just staring at me with a strange grin on her face. It was quite funny, really :) Made me feel like a bizarre mutant or some such thing once again, but hey, nothing wrong with mutants!