Could have been an expensive day....

After much thought and some discussion, I decided to have my hair cut. It's been long for about ten years now, with a fringe which I trimmed myself occasionally. It was ages since I'd been to a hairdresser. But a new one opened just around the corner about a year ago and every so often I told myself I should go in there. Trouble was, there were no prices advertised and I know hairdressers can be expensive. And I really don't like having other people cut my hair or anything like that.

But we're going away for a few days next week, and my head's been feeling heavy with the heat and humidity. It always happens, but this year I got fed up with it. Besides that, I'm feeling it's a year of milestones and it was about time for a symbolic change. Sometimes middled-aged or elderly people with long hair look even older than they are. I don't know if this is true for me, but I've had enough. So I booked a haircut for this afternoon.

The lady was very nice although she took some persuading to cut a lot of my hair off. She took a lot of care over it, and added various nice-smelling chemical things as she dried it after cutting. The whole process took about 50 minutes in all. It's ended up longer than I'd expected, but I think it looks all right. It certainly feels much lighter, and Richard says it looks good. It's certainly a starting-point towards much shorter hair.

This evening the air-conditioner man arrived with an assistant. They removed some air from the system, re-wired part of it, and spent a lot of time explaining to Richard what was wrong - as well as generally chatting. They must have been here over an hour in all. When they left, the unit was certainly blowing cool air although not as cold as we'd hoped. But anything's better than nothing, and we've moved my computer into the room with a/c. The repairman realises it isn't perfect but says the compressor is fine, and we must let him know if there are any other problems.

Back in the UK, I would expect to have paid at least £20 for the haircut I had, perhaps more since it was such a different style from the previous one. And I should think we would easily have paid £50 to the air-conditioner men. (Not that we needed a/c in the UK, of course, but that's quite beside the point!)

What did I actually pay?

£4 for the haircut. I had to ask the hairdresser to repeat it twice, I couldn't believe it was so low. [That's about £4.15 sterling, or $8 US]

As for the a/c, the repairman said he wasn't going to take any money from us until he knew for sure that it was working. So - at his insistence - we didn't pay him anything.

Sometimes I can't get over how inexpensive some things are here, and even Cyprus is considered very expensive when compared to, say, Egypt.