Hair Dye, Stick Shift, and Attempts at German

Hair Cuts and Hair Dye

Years ago when I started traveling, I got a haircut and color in a country that I was visiting because my hair was starting to look a little ratty and in need of repair. Little did I know that this brilliant idea to cut and color my hair in different countries where a language barrier existed would persist over time. Thus I arrive at present time. I meant to get a haircut before I came to Afghanistan, but ran out of time and thus it was long overdue.

Being that the base I currently call home wants it’s denizens to believe that they can have all of the creature comforts that they’re used to at home (or maybe the fact that they have to have some way to maintain military grooming standards), there are three locations on the base where you can get your hair trimmed, cut, or otherwise maimed.

The first of these locations is at the locals’ bazaar.  There you can have the local Afghani’s shave your head or even your face if you’re brave enough, male, and have a sense of adventure. Strike one for me.

The second location is the American salon. Here you can have pick from a varieties of services that include haircuts, mani/pedis, waxing, and massage. The prices are reasonable, but the selection is minimal. I walked in and asked what color options they had for a hair dye and was told to go to the PX (mini mart) and buy a box of whatever color I wanted (they usually have about three options when hair dye is in stock), then bring it back and pay them $40 to put it in and then rinse it out again. Thus, option 2 was a bust as well.

Option three is the German salon, which uses stylists from Russian and it’s neighboring “Stans”. They have a more expensive price lists for the same services offered at the American salon, but their shop looks like a salon (versus the American’s converted ConEx container) and contains real hair dyes.

I perused the color books they had and showed them the color I wanted (a chestnut brown shot through with red), which of course they didn't have it. So they did what any back water place with limited options does, they improvised. The stylist took a packet of bright red and a packet of brown and mixed them together. After leaving the mixture on for an hour my hair was a vibrant red and I was wondering whether I’d finally achieved that “Fire Engine Red” I’d been trying to get for years. Unfortunately, a rinse and a blow dry later and the true color was revealed. May hair was a dark mahogany with purple overtones. My hair being what my hair is picks up color sporadically and as such some parts of my hair were more brown and other parts more eggplant purple. It makes an interesting look and has garnered me the temporary nickname of “Red”, although I think “Purple” is more apt.

 

Learning to drive stick.

One of the first things that you start thinking about once you’ve arrived in country, is “Where do I want to go for R&R?” I know it’s sad. You get to a new place and all you can think about is vacation, but that’s the way it is. After some back and forth with family and some frustration, it was decided that Em and I would attempt to visit some of the UK this summer. We were originally going to go to Scotland, Ireland, and England, but due to time constraints, it appears that England might get dropped from the itinerary.

In an effort to make the trip more enjoyable and be able to see some sites that are off the beaten path a bit, Em and I are deciding to rent a car. Here’s where there’s a slight problem; most cars in the UK are manuals and neither Em nor I are all that good with driving one of those. The whole living in hilly and traffic ridden cities doesn’t lend much towards learning.

My co-workers, with many fine jibes dropped along the way, have offered to teach me to drive stick shift using the one car here that is a manual. The first lesson was the other day and involved one instructor and five hecklers. The hecklers stood around the car waiting with undisguised glee for me to stall out instantly. Maybe because that’s what they were hoping for or because luck was on my side for five seconds, I managed to back out of the spot, reverse the car, and then drive out of the compound without stalling the vehicle and making it look like I actually had an idea of what I was doing.

Ah, if only the first minute could have continued. The base has a speed limit of 12 mph so you can’t get the car much over second gear. I practiced stopping and then starting from stop, on the flat straight a-ways on the back part of the base and on the inclines of the little ramps that are all around. Was doing okay at first, but seems to get worse the longer I tried driving. If I wasn’t stalling out trying to start the car, I was burning rubber trying not to roll back down the little hills when I let up off the brake and attempted to hit the gas. I think that my “instructor’s” blood pressure went up a few points by the end. There might have also been a few pedestrians that were rethinking their afternoon walk.

I think that I need a few more lessons and then it’s “Watch out UK! Here I come. Death on four wheels and a mad gleam in my eye. If I can get the car into first gear that is….”

German via Rosetta Stone

In an effort to keep my brain from rotting and to teach myself something while I’m here, I acquired a copy of Rosetta Stone to learn German. I’m on a German base so figured it’d be a good language to learn.

Rosetta Stone is a pretty cool tool for learning languages as it uses pictures and voice recognition to teach you. From the two hours that I’ve put into it so far, I’ve determined that if German were spoken to me with picture books, I’d be great, but that speaking is going to be a little harder.

The program has you repeat back the words and phrases that it says so that you can learn them and get the pronunciations down. What it doesn’t take into account is accent or the fact that you might not know where your computer’s microphone is. I purposely bought a pair of headphones that said they had a build in microphone, but every time I tried talking into where I thought the mike was, the computer told me it didn’t detect sound. After some investigation, I figured out that the computer was using its own microphone to detect me. Problem is, I don’t actually know where the microphone in the computer is and just shout at it randomly hoping that it’ll pick up my voice.

Once the sound issue was resolved, I still had to deal with the pronunciation issue. If you don’t get the pronunciation right, you get the “fail button” sound. Say a word ten times with the same result and you end up resorting to yelling the word in a multitude of ways at the computer just hoping to hear the sound of “good job”.

Wearing headphones and shouting at the computer in random accents entertains your lab mate immensely and also makes you less aware of your surroundings. When you’re at the point where you’re alternating between cursing the stupid program and yelling the German word again, is also the point where one of the two Germans that work in your compound walks in. End result, every time the German sees you from that point on, he greets you with “Katze” (German for cat) as that’s what you were shouting so ardently at the computer when he walked in. Said German also likes to sneak up behind you and yell it in your ear.

Too bad I couldn’t have been shouting something cool at the time. Maybe next time he walks in.