The time had come to face all my fears and finally get a haircut here in Korea. I was just terrified because I've heard of some foreign girls really getting butchered or ending up with flaming red hair. So I had one of the Korean teachers write a little note for me and I picked some random beauty shop by my school.

The initial encounter was smooth enough, but then things started to get scary. I showed the Korean note to the forty-something woman who sat me down and started to wet my hair with a spray bottle. There was enough hair on the floor to know that they hadn't swept the floor once that day - this was at 9:00 at night. The Korean woman, who was pretty classy looking, would brush my hair a little, and then brush hers, and then brush mine again. This proceeded until we both had nicely brushed hair. Obviously she doesn’t know about the blue magic potion.

While I was sitting in the chair several people came and went. A business man tried to show off all his English skills to me, telling me that he loved me. An ajumma came in and acted as if I was on display there in the chair solely for her viewing pleasure. Don't think she's seen too many foreigners. She stopped to gawk at me for a while, but she had a big smile on her face so I didn't mind. I gave her a polite 'annyeong hasseyo' and I thought she was going to have a heart attack at hearing a waygook speaking Korean. I felt like a freak and a superstar all in the same instant.

About half way through the haircut the Korean woman stopped everything she was doing and looked at me as if she was seeing her new born baby for the first time. She then proceeded to caress my face, and slowly touch my eyelids and my nose and then my lips. Without saying a word she went though this routine twice with a warm smile on her face. I didn't know whether to laugh or to run. When she was satisfied, she went back to cutting my hair as if it were all part of the process, and I sat there too stunned to wipe the frozen smile off my face.

When she finished my haircut she started writing me a little note. I couldn’t imagine what she had written, but I looked at the note and obviously couldn't read it. She took it back and wrote more on it. She gave it back to me and I politely nodded and put it in my pocket. The next day I brought it to school to have the Koreans read it for me. They crinkled up their noses and said, "Gross! Where did you get this?"

It was a love poem about my skin and eyes and nose and lips...