The Haarschnitt Diaries

As we celebrated our five-week Swiss anniversary last Wednesday, I passed an even more exciting milestone on Thursday--six weeks since my last Chicago haircut and overdue for a trim. In Chicago I had reached the apex of men's hairstyling, that is, an old-school barbershop conveniently located in my downtown office building, operated by a friendly familiar Chicago-Italian barber named Joe Gambino who provided "the usual" monthly cut complete with Playboy magazines (great articles) and hot lather straight-razor neck shave. A hard act to follow.

Kloten and Zürich are full of coiffure establishments; although German for barber is Friseur, the Swiss universally adopt the French term. For our Thursday morning walk, Hobbes and I spent over an hour canvassing every last Kloten city coiffure (unbeknownst to Hobbes who is also overdue for a trim, we have a canine coiffure scheduled in December, but that's a different story). Although most salons advertise for both Damen and Herren, I ultimately selected a small, three-chair Herren-only barbershop primarily for its proximity adjacent to the village-style Kloten restaurant where I snarfed my first Swiss lunch, a delicious grilled pork chop seasoned with herbed butter.

The problem of course with foreign haircuts is communication of the details; I've experienced only one foreign haircut, in Ireland where the guy spoke English with such an accent that we couldn't communicate properly. To circumvent that problem, and thanks to the miracle of Internet online translation, I spent Thursday morning researching and composing my Haarschnitt Brief, i.e., my Haircut Letter. In polite prose, it requested a haircut, provided some guidelines and finished with, "Don't worry, my hair isn't beautiful so you can't make any mistakes."

At 3pm I parked my bike outside and sauntered into the shop, unoccupied but for the hairdresser, and tried my usual bit of German to confirm she spoke virtually no English--a perfect start. I produced the Letter which earned a slight chuckle and we worked out in German my return for a 4pm reservation. Once seated at the prescribed time, things proceeded swimmingly. After pantomiming with finger-scissors her plan of attack on my head--which was right on the money--she began the usual barber chair conversation in Swiss-German, e.g., where are you from? where do you work? do you have any kids?, etc., and I limped along as best I could with my limited vocabulary.

Apparently she believed I comprehended much more than I did, as she launched into a variety of subjects such as Zürich being too crowded, her boyfriend working in New York for a while and--after I said, "Work is not fun"--something about enjoying working for an e-magazine. She has two kids, a boy and a girl, ages 19 and 21 and jokingly pretended to be insulted when I didn't clarify my pronoun usage, thus accidentally proclaiming, "You are old!" instead of "They are old!"

Overall the conversation was enjoyable but agonizing because I wanted to understand and convey so much more. Prior to moving to Switzerland, I had completed an excellent year-long Spanish study program in which I've now become fairly conversational (great timing, eh? Not a soul in Switzerland speaks Spanish). Most agonizing about the haircut "dialogue" was that I completely recognize my crummy level of German because I remember that exact Spanish phase, i.e., the completely useless beginner phase. I'm certain we could have conducted the same conversation in complete depth in Spanish. Currently I know 200 German words with one verb tense vs. 2,000 Spanish words with a dozen tenses, so my relative knowledge appears about 10%. I'm also quite aware that the only method for bridging the gap is hours of weekly study and practice for 18 months or longer.

By the way, the haircut turned out perfectly. She omitted hot lather on the neck shave but used some crazy curved razor blade which worked well. So now I have another 4-6 weeks to perfect the phrase in German, "Do you carry any other magazines?"