한국 이발 그리고 대만 Korean Haircut and Taiwan

Thursday, 3/5/2015

Taiwan

Before the main post, I figured I'd take a little time to briefly summarize my trip to Taiwan.  I want this blog to mainly focus on Korea, but a lot of you have been asking about Taiwan, so I thought it would be good to do a quick overview.

Initially I was thinking of going to Japan for a week or so while I was over here since I've always wanted to go and had the luxury of time, but after being here for a while I realized I wasn't really prepared logistically or linguistically for that trip and I'd rather just focus on enjoying Korea, so I'll have to save it for another time.  However, I had some other friends from medical school doing an away rotation in Taipei, Taiwan, so the stars aligned well for a quick (really just like 48 hours of actual city time) trip to Taipei.  Brief as it was though, the weather was significantly warmer than in Seoul and we made the most of it by covering a lot of ground, which mostly means we ate a lot of food.

Again, my flight was delayed by 20 minutes,

but Thai Airways was actually quite lovely and I made a new friend from Seoul on the flight over.  Other than that, forgetting my SD card in Seoul, and an unfortunate mix-up with the flush and bidet functions of Harriet and Jamie's toilet at their Taipei apartment, the trip was without mishap. 

#Bidetproblems

But anyway, here is the trip in pictures:

The Taipei 101 super skyscraper is the 2nd tallest building in the world and a landmark of Asian modernization.  It is almost 1,700ft tall with 101 floors, and absolutely dwarfs all the other building around it and even the mountains adjacent to the city.

Here it is lit up at night,

and here it is trying to be Sauron.

We also went for a hike in one of the mountains around the city, which was awesome, if a bit soggy.

It was the rainy season after all.

At one point, we had to climb up these sheer cliffs with ropes and metal handholds and it was terrifying/awesome.

The four beasts of Four Beast mountain (1000 ft).

Taipei 101 is even taller though.

The rest of the trip was spent wandering through Taipei from restaurant to restaurant, food cart to food cart, in pursuit of the many delicious, cheap, and unique foods there.

Wax apples (Myrtaceae)--a fruit I've wanted to try forever--it's got the texture of watermelon rind, but tastes like an apple/pear.

Another bucket list fruit:  the guanabana or soursop (Annonaceae).  Seriously, probably the best fruit I've ever had.  It's incredibly sweet with the texture of a ripe pear, and the flavor is somewhere between banana, pineapple, and pear.  (Florida bio and marine bio folks, it is everything Dan Skean said it was and more.)

A fruit stand in Shilin night market.

Our compulsory dinner at Din Tai Fung--a famous dumpling house that originated in Taipei.  Their specialty is shiao long bao--steamed pork dumplings full of soup stock, pork, and vegetables--we got four orders.

Stinky tofu--stinky, yet satisfying.

Oyster omelet, another Taiwanese specialty.

Duck skulls and duck necks.  We sat this one out.

We did try duck tongues though :P

So a whirlwind tour it was, but it was a lot of fun and we got to do a lot of things in the given amount of time.  Oh, and the drivers there are crazy; I'll just leave this here:

Thursday, 2/26/2015

Haircut Time:

Change is hard.  I don't think it's something that naturally comes easily to anyone, especially me, and though I think I've gotten much more flexible over the years, some things are just easier to do the same way they've been done forever.  My haircut is probably the best example of that side of me as it has gone through very few changes in my life, but being in Korea, world leader in haute hairstyling (where barbers are called stylists and can charge upwards of $200 for a haircut) and the country that brought you this:

 which I call "the sexy paintbrush," and this:

 which they clearly just stole from Neopolitan ice cream

--I figured it was time to take a leap of faith and try to embrace the pop culture a bit.  In that spirit, last week, I went with my friends to get a "Korean" haircut.

Now before we get to that, let me take you through a quick (and I say quick, because I really only changed it like 3 times ever) history of my do without further ado (heh):

Age 0-4:  This hardly counts; typical little kid haircut that I had no control over.

Here it is not too long after the stage where it stuck straight up.  I apologize for not having a picture of that, but there are only a few old photos on my laptop and my parents don't know how to use the scanner.

Age 5-like 14:  Bowl cut.  Rocked that shit for pretty much all of elementary and middle school with the rat tail combo through grade school that you now know about (and now understand was racially motivated so you can't make fun of me, right?)

Just chillin' with my friends.

High School:  So for you non-Lumen Christi-ers, we had a dress code at Lumen that had stipulations about hair for boys:  it can't touch your collar, it can't touch your ears, it can't go below your eyes, and natural family planning is the only acceptable method of birth control.  So naturally, many of the boys wanted to grow their hair out as long as possible without incurring disciplinary action.  Now if you're trying to imagine what straddling that delicate line looks like, let me help you; it looks like this:

It's like a tiny Asian Elvis.  Also, these shirts are actually white and gold.

Franz, Leah, and Eric, I believe this might have been Team Blue's day of glorious triumph...

College:  Unfettered now as I was by private school hair length restrictions, I just went balls-out with it, only getting haircuts when I couldn't see enough to serve in tennis or Stephanie would start punching me.

Yes, my hair is ridiculously long, but Colin is wearing jorts.

Medical School:  Perhaps as more maturity and social awareness began to slowly sink in, I have been gradually getting my hair cut shorter and shorter since the beginning of med school.

Here I am reading a bedtime story to a pair of gloves.

All right, back to the present.  Now the motivation behind getting a haircut here seems pretty sound, but the subsequent planning was not.  Your suggestions via Facebook were, believe it or not, less than helpful (except for Greg, which actually did influence the result), and I just kind of dropped the ball on researching out the possibilities.  I clicked through some images on Google and creepily took pictures of Korean dudes on the subway and stuff, but in the end when Peter, Grace, and I walked into Blooming Hair Salon in Sodaemun, what I had prepared basically amounted to asking the stylist, "one Korean haircut please!"  

I had a couple example pictures to show her and I stipulated no dye, no perm, and not too much maintenance, but that was literally it.  She and Peter conversed quickly in Korean for a couple minutes, in the span of which the magnitude of my unpreparedness sank in and I began to get quite nervous about how this was all going to turn out.  It was then that I noticed that the stylist was wearing a plastic apron like a butcher, that my hair, ya know, really looked just fine the way it was right then anyway, and this thing:

I have no idea, but it was very grabby and intimidating.

At this point, I rather urgently started trying to have Peter relay that I definitely did NOT want to have this crazy bowl-cut-on-top-shaved-sides nonsense that I'd been seeing around, or this:

or this:

There are 28 state-approved haircuts that you can get in North Korea, and that is a fact.

Well stylist Moon seemed pretty confident that she could whip something up that I would like, so that was reassuring, but she went after it so fast that I had no choice but to just go with it at that point as a steady flurry of black hair tumbled to the floor.  The style she was going for is called "two block" and it basically means short on the sides and back, but still kind of long on top--it's what the kids here are doing these days I guess.  Here it is in stages:

That's what nervous laughter looks like.

First go the sides...

Then the back...

Then the fancy detail work.

The thing is, with a Korean haircut, you're not done after the cut--you have to style it too.  Previous to this, my only experience with styling was parting my bowl cut with gel in middle school because I thought it was cool.  Well lucky for me, Peter is a Korean styling expert and has been doing it since before he could walk or sing a Brian McKnight ballad, so he took me under his wing to teach me how to maintain my new do.

First is blowdrying, which apparently you do to train the hair and give it volume and it's really hard and I'm bad at it.

He can even do a no-look.

Oops.  This is the 100% inevitable result of giving Grace your camera.

Then you have to wax it, which involves lightly brushing the ends of the hair to set the shape and make it look intentionally a little messy, but "not the way you're doing it though, Mark".

I did it wrong again, so Peter had to step in again.

In the end though, I was really very pleased with the result, and my mom said she likes it.  So despite having to get used to styling it (I just let it air dry today; don't tell Peter), I really like it and am glad to have taken another opportunity to explore and embrace my Korean side.

Updates and Things:

Mr. Goo Thinks I Am a Cartoon (2/23):  Mr. Goo informed my housemates recently that he thinks I am a cartoon character.  I'm not sure exactly what he means, but he screenshots my misspelled Korean texts and randomly takes pictures of me in the apartment (like when I am editing photos, shaving, or eating breakfast).  I'm pretty sure that his perception of me is basically like what yours would be of the child who made this:

Carded in Seoul (2/27):  I went to the corner store to buy some alcohol because our house was going out that night.  Well I approached the counter with a bottle of makgeolli, a six pack of shitty Korean beer, and some unidentified Korean drink and the lady at the cash register looked at me very suspiciously, asked "몇 사리에요? (How old are you?)"  I handed her my Michigan license and she puzzled over it for a good 30 seconds before conceding that yes, she believed that I was over 19 years-old, the legal drinking age in Korea.

Busan and Gyeongju (3/6):  Peter and I are headed for the south of the peninsula to the cities of Busan and Gyeongju for the next couple of days.  No laptop, but Busan is a bustling port city with lots of cool things to do and Gyeongju is the old capital of the Silla kingdom--the dominant of the three kingdoms of feudal Korea--so there should be lots of updates when we return.

Until then,

Mark