Cut Cut, Snip, Snip

Last Saturday evening, Andrew and I decided to get our haircut in preparation for my brother’s wedding we would be attending on October 11. We asked various fellow teachers where would be a good place to get a haircut. After a good recommendation from our friend Peter, we finally decided on a place called Tony Tun Tuns. They have stylists who have trained in Bangkok and have a few people who have experience cutting Western hair. We thought this would be a good sign.
We were in downtown Yangon on Saturday evening and walked to Tony Tun Tuns, which was a few minutes walk from our friend’s apartment. The salon itself looked fairly normal with kind of early 1990s black and white décor. No waiting was needed as both Andrew and I immediately had a stylist lead us to the hairwashing tables.
Here you lie flat on a table and get your hair washed. This is where SE Asia and American salons differ. The stylists not only washed our hair, they shampooed it 3 times. After the washing, they give you a slightly enjoyable and slightly painful head, scalp and shoulder massage. Sometimes I thought, this feels great and at other moments, I thought “this must be the painful experience described as beer massage.”
Another big difference between SE Asia and America is the lack of a steady stream of electricity. Even in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, there are constant power outages. They never last that long, anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes, but they happen fairly regularly. At the international school where we teach, the power goes out at least once a day and then the generators kick in. You get used to this fact of life fairly easy, but it can be a bit inconvenient at times.
We were getting our haircut after sundown around 6:45pm and the power went out about 5 times during that period. The stylist would be cutting my hair and all of a sudden the power would go out and we would be submerged in total darkness. They would stop in mid-cut and wait. Then the lights would come back on, the music would begin blaring and the cutting would resume as if nothing had happened.
In the end, we both received fairly good haircuts and experienced some good service. I had about three different people working on my hair most of the time: one to style, one to blow-dry and one to brush. As I was the only person in the place with long brown hair, I also had a lot of stylists come by just to touch my hair. Talk about attention-o-rama! The best part was that two haircuts, with a triple shampoo and head/shoulder massage came to the high price of $9. And that is why I love SE Asia!