They massage your head!...or crashing the party

Today after work I went to lunch with the girls at the Chinese restaurant across the street from city hall. On the way back I ran into the boy coming back from lunch. He was running late so we didn't get much of a chance to talk but there was enough time for both of us to get awkward.

I sent him a text later laughing about it and he replied saying that whenever he runs into me accidentally he can't seem to get the words to come. lol. God I'm in middle school again aren't I?

Later Phil called and said he was going to get his hair cut. It has been about 10 months since my last hair cut and I have a date tomorrow...so why not? I could use a trim. My hair is the longest now it has been....ever.

But...going to the hairdresser in Japan is scary. I have trouble telling the American hairstylists what I want let alone trying to tell a Japanese guy.

But Phil had been to this place before so I let him help me out. I am always nervous before doing something knew here and having someone there who has done it before was helpful.

The Japanese know how to treat you at the salon. They wash your hair for like 15 minutes and give you a scalp massage. They also work really quickly. The guy who was working on Phil also cut my hair and he just went back and forth between us. When Phil was getting his hair blow dried by the other guy, the main guy cut my hair.

We got a lot of star treatment being a. foreigners and b. foreigners who can speak Japanese. Some of the staff knew Phil from the last 2 times he went there and they kept coming over and asking him if I was his girlfriend...to which he vehemently disagreed. It actually became a really funny conversation because I responded by asking him why it was such a bad thing. But of course I am friends with his girlfriend so....no.

I had to figure out how many centimeters are in 2 inches because that was all I wanted cut off...so when I said I wanted like 5-6 centimeters cut off and the hair stylist questioned that several times, I was concerned. But apparently he just thought my hair looked like crap and needed more than 2 inches cut off...so he did anyway.

I wanted to cry. He did this Japanese hair thing where they make like feather (is that the right word, I dunno but they thin out the lower layers of your hair) and it looks weird before it is styled...and I don't like to style my hair...and it was really short...and I was freaking out.

Then the other hairstylist dude came over and asked if I wanted it styled the Japanese way. And I was just like...why not! Might as well. So they curled it. Had my hair been longer I would have had the octopus hairstyle but it actually looked kind of cute. Which means I have been here too long.

After getting pampered a bit more with massages and boys doing my hair, Phil and I got directions to a cool sounding bar from our hairstylist and then went to dinner. We got some pizza and omuraisu and tried to get people to go out with us.

Liz was at an after work party with the English teachers at her school and was trying to escape but couldn't so Phil and I went off to find her. We got directions to the bar she was at and we were going to just "happen to show up" and eventually abscond with them (being Liz and Nelis).

Well it turns out that this was more like a hostess bar with karaoke and a woman walking around pouring drinks for you...so we wouldn't have just accidentally shown up there...

Also Liz didn't want to leave by the time we got there....so we were invited to join. Yep we crashed a Japanese work party.

Thankfully they were all English teachers and sufficiently drunk by this point so it ended up being pretty fun. We sang some Third Eye Blind, Green Day, Cranberries, and of course some of the Beatles and essentially made idiots out of ourselves. Some of the Japanese people were crazy too. There was this one guy who just kept singing in this weird voice high pitched voice. It was hilarious.

After a while we finally decided to head out since it was getting late...and when we said we were going, the whole party broke up. Phil and I ended up having to pay about $40 for crashing the party, which when added to my $60 haircut, made it a pretty expensive evening...