Just a little off the top...

When I get my hair cut, I like going to the same place even if it's not the same person cutting my hair. It's like my own form of OCD. When I first moved to Jerusalem, I kept getting my hair cut in Tel Aviv as I was there at least once a week and, like I said: OCD. However, a few months ago, I decided this was silly and that I needed to just find a place in Jerusalem and be done with it.

The only place I was keen on, that wasn't on the main drag and didn't look like an over-priced salon, was this little barbershop across the street from where my friend Emily used to live. A bit past the market, it was tucked away on the first floor of a large commercial building between a laundromat and a bike store. I didn't know anything about it except that I'd walked by it a thousand times and it look reasonably priced.

Today I went back for my second hair cut. The shop is run by three religious men who have moved here from France. I'm not sure if they knew each other beforehand or not (I think not, as they seem to all have been here for various lengths of time), and most of the clientèle is also French-speaking religious Israelis.

And then there's me. Not Jewish. Not French. Not Israeli. Oh well.

The guy that cut my hair today chatted with me the whole time. It worked out well because he speaks only marginally better Hebrew than I do. I found out that he's lived here eight years, he was a barber before he arrived in Israel, he was born in Algeria and soon after his family fled to France to escape the war, and that he really likes Sylvester Stallone films.

It makes me kind of sad that I'll probably only need one more haircut before I return to the States in July.