Hair in Ghana

Well my dredlocks are always a subject of conversation on the street (several men per day will tell me as I pass by that they love my dredlocks and that they, too, want to Rastafy (as they leer...) (...sigh...)) but I have finally gone to a loctician here to have my hair retightened. It was awesome. The Loctician here has a spa of her own which was quite large and spacious, and the appointment was only about $30.00 Canadian! (compared with the $80-110 that I pay every 6 weeks in Toronto!)

For 10 extra Cedis (about $5) she offered to do a style for me as well. That's where I made my mistake.

I said hey, sure! I've never had anyone style my locks before, for 5 bucks? why not?

She tried, she really did, but people (even black people) are so taken aback at the magnitude of my hair

"Its so...thick... I just can't... the thickness, like, it just won't... see if it would just..."

that's what I heard for the next 20 minutes as the poor hairdresser tried her best to wrestle my ridiculous amount of relatively short hair into some sort of style.

This is what she came up with.

Yeah. not quite my style... but I didn't have the heart to tell her. I walked around like this for the next 2 hours and the stares and comments were even MORE forthcoming than usual (if that is possible). When I got back to the house, I made some slight alterations to the front so that it looked like this,

but I took the whole thing down that evening because it just wasn't me. I might try a style again next time, but like Jenn keeps telling me, I'm going to have to be a little more assertive from the outset as to what exactly I want to look like at the end of the day!