Above: Ecuador’s block
For the past few days, I’ve been staying in a poor barrio in the city of Guayaquil in southern Ecuador. My host, a man by the name of Ecuador, is the founder of a local bicycle club in Guayaquil and has been nothing but hospitable. Today he was late for work because he insisted on walking me to a local barber shop.
Above: One of the best meals I had in Ecuador…with Ecuador…and his wife
When I walked into the joint, two guys were sitting in silence on chairs against the wall, waiting to get haircuts. The one barber who ran the place, the only person working in the two-chair shop, was chatting with a customer about the different political problems plaguing Guayaquil. Hair lay scattered at the barber’s feet like tiny anthills of black dirt. With a master’s speed, the man clipped away.
My turn came and I plopped down in the worn leather chair. The man strung up a plastic apron around my neck, first placing a line of toilet paper around the apron’s collar, and shook out hair from the previous customer from his comb.
“You want the same haircut the other guy just got, right?” The man asked in Spanish.
I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but that last three customers had received the same exact haircut–a gradual fade that bled into a slicked-back plume on top.
“Can I get something a little different?” I asked. Never before had I asked a barber for permission to have my hair cut a certain way. “I just want my head shaved. With the buzzer. A number two razor on my whole head. Easy. Is that OK?”
For a split second, my luck could have gone either way. The old barber’s gray eyes showed no sign of acceptance of my proposal. He mulled over the prospect of creating a renegade customer, some hair freak who would walk the streets without the barber’s signature do, a lost advertising opportunity. Then, he smiled and reached for the buzzer.
“No problem.”
After 10 minutes, I paid my $1.25 U.S. and left the shop a few bazillion hairs lighter.
Above: I feel like a walking Which-of-These-Things-Doesn’t-Belong picture in a children’s book. Which is fun, by the way.
