Leicester Square & Hair

As well as an aside on Chinese food.

We were stuck in the tube carriage for ages. We got impatient and got off. Moment afterward we were on a train to Leicester Square. The idea behind this was to go anywhere busy and to get some food. As you can see on the map accessed by clicking on Ken Livingston's face, jumping from South Ken to Leicester Square is easy - a few stops. We jumped. Getting off at Leicester Square we decided to simply meander around in an attempt to find somewhere to eat. It was the kind of evening where we didn't want anything fussy, expensive, or time consuming; we wanted food. To our good fortune, and because of our obvious prior knowledge, we were in the Chinese quarter. The thing about the Chinese district is that it isn't expensive, fussy or time consuming. Hence Chinese food = ideal.
After a few walks up and down some random road the name of which I've forgotten, we plumped on a place. A large part of the decision was based on the number of local (i.e. Asian looking) people who were eating there. I felt bad doing this because it was taking advantage of the locals and meant that we had to put relatively little effort into finding a place, but it did honour them with our trust in that we were assuming they went to the overall better establishments be that measuring value or food quality. I thought it was great.
Having finished eating around eight we thought, no I thought I'd restate my previously thought-out-loud desire to check out the hair dressers across the street from the restaurant. It was an Asian place (surprise surprise), and looked slightly closed; there were people inside but no hairdressing actually going on.
I went in, glanced around, and was immediately greeted by a voice saying something like 'Haircut!’ I looked around to try and place the voice, not having been able to locate the source. It turned out the noises were coming from a short and thin woman who had her hair in a sink being washed by another younger woman. Rushing a towel onto her head she grabbed my arm after I'd made some sort of affirmative nod, having not been able to think of a suitable reply to this, what seemed like an exclamation.
She ushered me towards a book of photos of boys. This was more like it! It turned out she wanted me to give some sort of guide towards the style of haircut I wanted. Needless to say, I didn’t know what I wanted – that’s the heterosexual man in me, the only last scrap.
I actually had my hair cut by ‘Sun’, a woman of about 22 from Malaysia who spoke “hardly any” English, though “hardly any” was far better than what my French would have been. She also spoke four other languages, not counting English. Another experience for me was that she washed my hair three times over the course of the 45 minutes it took to cut my hair. Superspeedy.
I enjoyed it – mainly because of the off chance nature of the evening. Let’s do something spontaneous.