Finally miss Canadian prices!

Well, my plans to study study study for the past few days have gone as is usual - meaning not at all.

Last night I went to Mong Kok with Pei-chin, Wen Li, and Jen. I've gotten over the stage of having to buy something while I'm out. Therefore the only thing I bought (besides food) was a barette for like $1.7CAD. The others bought over $300HKD worth of clothes and the like.

I was very amused by our dinner. Pei-chin and Wen Li wanted to eat somewhere really cheap... So we ended up going into one of those shifty chinese restaurants. Everything was in chinese (no pictures), so they had to translate for me. I helped narrow it down by telling them what kind of meat and noodle I wanted. The rest was up to them. The establishment was very, err, not clean looking. And half way through our meal, I watched them moving a giant bucket of soup base into the kitchen. The same soup base I was currently eating. The soup base looked like dirty dish water.

Well, the next day we decided to hit up Central. Wen Li had been wanting to cut her hair - it was down to her hips! It was so heavy, she couldn't even use regular elastic bands to hold it up anymore. So we looked up a bunch of hair stylists to check out.

It was fun, but tiresome at the same time. There were 5 of us this time, and each of us wanted something done to their hair - hair cut, perm, straigtening, colour, etc. In a nutshell we travelled all around Central all morning and couldn't decide on anything - we were too big of a group to accomplish anything.

Well, finally Pei-chin, Wen Li, Jen and I went back to the Mong Kok mall (Pan had to leave for a class). We went for lunch and on our way out, saw a sign for a salon in the mall. We decided to check it out, and within 10 minutes, I had decided to get my hair done there. (Mainly because they could speak decent English there.)

Soon Jen and Wen Li had decided to join me. One one hand the place rocked, but on the other, I felt like rolling my eyes and tapping my foot. Let's start with the bad then move on to the good.

I think my biggest problem with the place was the amount of staff they had working there. I was getting a regular old perm - something that would only take 60-90 minutes in Canada. I was there for nearly 3 hours! And in that time, I had 4 different people working on me. What the hell man? How can these people run a cost-efficient business when you have two people cutting someone's hair - one to wield the scissors, and another to hold the non-ready-to-be-cut-hair out of the way. My other issue was that things just seemed to be slow in general - e.g. they were drying my hair from sopping wet to nearly dry with blow dryers (this is when I appreciated having two people doing it - if only to speed up the process). It took forever to get done.

As for the good part... My perm looks fabulous (actually, it looks better than it normally does when coming out of a salon in Canada - but this is just temporary - it'll look different when I style it myself). It was nice to see that the people were doing EXACTLY what I told them. They didn't argue and they asked continual questions to ensure they were doing it correctly. (E.g. they originally thought I wanted a spiral perm, but then the lady asked how they normally do my rollers in Canada and realized that I didn't want a spiral perm.) It was cool in that respect.

Another bonus: I got to wear a funny black Japanese robe thingie. That was too narrow for my shoulders. I looked like a sumo wrestler fitting into a kimono. An amusing, but not pretty image.

Sadly perms here at a relatively decent salon (and even non-decent salons) cost an arm and a leg. :( In my hometown, I'd pay around $80CAD for a perm, or even around $110CAD in a nicer salon in a larger/upscale city. Here, I paid $150CAD. :( And that was cheap. Most salons charge around $1400-$2000HKD. Oh well, at least I got what I paid for.

Oh, and Wen Li got about 15 centimeters chopped off the back of her head, and even more in the front. Her haircut looks fabulous! Very cool.