20 east

Had my hair cut yesterday at “Poodles R Us” in the basement of Złote Tarasy. Bit of a girly place but aren’t they all. Paid what seems the going rate these days, 50PLN, 10 quid and got pretty much the usual treatment. It’s my own fault because I treat getting my hair cut in an extremely offhand manner. I let it grow until the point it gets so annoying that I can’t stand it any longer and then dive into the first hairdresser I can find, wherever I happen to be at the time. I’m not a big hairdo chatterbox so I don’t really care about being denied the continuation of past gossiping as I’m sure some people do. The only place I’ve had my hair cut and been amazed enough to want to go back again and again was in Istanbul. Now that was a hair cut! Those Turks really do know what they’re doing. Hot towels, creams, after-shave, powders (to stop the itching), perfect shave, perfect haircut, honing the edge of the blade on a leather strap, the whole ball of wax. They seemed to be not only enjoying it but proud of their profession and in giving excellent customer satisfaction. Never had anything like it in any other country, ever. Of course, Istanbul is not exactly convenient so I have to make do with whatever I can find in Warsaw most of the time, which is not much to write home about.

My nomadic haircut strategy means I’ve tried plenty of places in this city and they seem to fall broadly into two categories. Places for poofs and places for old geezers. In the poofs places the emphasis is on washing your hair five times (when it doesn’t need washing), dressing you up in a bunch of robes and stuff that invariably don’t fit me and attempting to blow away all the chopped hair (usually down my neck). When it comes to the cut itself, the hairdresser is nearly always female and that means they will be good with scissors and total rubbish with clippers. As most of my haircut these days revolves around clipping as opposed to cutting, this is bad news. What is it with women and clippers? They hold the things like they are trying to manipulate a pneumatic road-drill with one hand. They don’t glide them over your head, they sort of hack at it digging the pointy bits into your skin and getting all annoyed when your ears get in the way. It is as if the clippers, and your head, are completely foreign objects to them and they sort of muddle through hoping that everything will work out in the end. Give them scissors and suddenly they are snipping away like Torvill & Dean doing the Bolero.

When I can’t bear the thought of yet another nightmare on clipper street, I seek out a place that promises to be a man’s barbers shop. My favourite so far is tucked away close to Hala Mirowska next to the shop that looks dodgy but sells good cold meat and stuff, near the flower stalls. This place is run by the Warsaw equivalent of Walter Matthau & Jack Lemmon playing grumpy old men both well over retirement age. Nothing has changed in this shop since before the war and it does not look like any of the equipment gets much use these days. It was a fun experience, it was dirt cheap but I’ve resisted the urge to return. Another place I found was opposite Rondo 1. There’s a young guy in there who did a good cut without all the poofy stuff but they charge the same as if you got all the poofy stuff so it feels like a rip-off and most of the time the young guy is not there so you’re left with George & Mildred, presumably the owners, who spend most of the time arguing and looking like they’d rather be anywhere than cutting your hair.

What the barbers shops do give you is clipper skills. The problem is that they often lack scissor skills and are completely devoid of customer skills. So a trip to these places tends to be a grumpy experience and you end up looking like you signed up for Iraq.

I suppose I’ll just have to investigate cheap flights to Istanbul.