Buenos Aires - Thursday - aka "Sexy! SEXY!"

OK.

Thursday.

I woke up in time to enjoy continental breakfast in the hotel for the first time. I was exhausted. I hadn't slept well the night before and was dead tired. We had to get up early to eat breakfast because M and I had hair appointments at 12:00 at the salone that P's mother goes to.

The continental breakfast was nothing special. We watched the news of the London bombings while I attempted to ingest the worst scrambled eggs I have ever tasted. I ended up having a bowl of sort-of-frosted-flakes and a small piece of bread.

N was supposed to meet us at the hotel to take us to the salon and to hopefully assist us in translating our hair needs to the hairdressers, but she was unable to due to her friends' flight being delayed. She was stranded at the airport, so we hopped in a cab and headed to the salon.

When we got there, we realized that explaining our haircuts wasn't going to be easy. They showed me some photos, but none of them really represented what I wanted - a shaggy fun haircut with better bangs, with roots dyed black so as to blend my hair better, and then blonde streaks and chunks throughout. Funky. How do you say "funky" in Spanish?

We weren't getting anywhere, so M tried to call P's cell phone to get him to help us explain what we wanted done with our hair.

I'd been having difficulty throughout the trip getting through to P's phone from mine, and this day was no exception. M was frustrated, but luckily the hairdressers got P on their phone!

P, once again Our Hero, got on the phone and tried to understand what I was saying. "Bangs, P, bangs! I want BANGS!" I'd hand the phone to the hairdresser and there would be talk and shaking of heads and then I'd be handed the phone and P would say something like "They said that they may not be able to dye your hair blonde because its so dark... are you sure?" "Yes, I am sure. I want it to be, like, shaggy." "Shaggy? What is shaggy?"

Yeah. It was fun. And funny. I think we eventually both gave up, unfortunately before M had a chance to have P explain what she wanted to the hairdressers.

I decided to just chill out and not worry about what would happen to my hair. I trusted them, and figured it couldn't look worse than it already did.

OK.

So we got there at noon.

We left at, like, 5:00.

5:00!!! IT TOOK FIVE HOURS!!!

It didn't have to. It was inefficient. There was a lot of waiting around when nothing was going on. There was not enough multitasking. I didn't really care, though, given how inexpensive it was. I only cared because I was STARVING TO DEATH because all I'd eaten was a bowl of cereal at 10am.

Incidentally, before I was starving and moody and insane, I was psyched when Patrick Swayze's "She's Like the Wind" was played on the radio. How rad is that?

The hairdresser was AWESOME. He didn't speak much English, but he knew enough to exclaim "Sexy! SEXY!" while he played with my hair before he cut it. The cut is absolutely spectacular. I love it. People at work have been saying "Man, that really is a good cut."

The colorist was nice as well. Bleaching my hair took, like, an hour, which was overkill. I've had this done before and it's always worked and has never required the length of time, but I had no way of explaining this to anyone. When they finished the bleaching, they gave my hair some mysterious treatment that I've never had. I was lying over the sink and they put something on my scalp that burned. It hurt so very much. I was just sitting there, head draped over the sink, for half an hour and I had no idea why. Above me, three separate people looked at my hair somewhat quizzically, somewhat concerned, never enthusiastically. Every so often they would touch it and shake their heads. I felt rather Alien Autopsy about the whole thing. Like they were doing things to me that actually hurt but I had no idea what they were doing or saying. I was dreading what was going on with my hair. I was actually afraid to see it. P's Mom, who showed up because she was nervous about what my hair would turn out like, kept saying "I think it will be ok..."

It did, of course, turn out to be more than ok.

Here is M getting her hair cut:



Her hair ended up a little more blonde than she'd anticipated, but it looks awesome. It will just take some getting used to.

My hair turned out awesome as well - my roots are now in order and I have lovely and perfectly placed streaks of blonde in strategic places.

And guess how much it all was! Three things - dye my hair black, awesome haircut, and then blonde chunks etc. - all for 120 pesos!!! That's, like, $40 American. Yeah. Awshummmm.

P's mother, again concerned about our safe return to the hotel. was extremely sweet and gave us a ride. I think it was about 6pm by the time we returned, and M and I were both ravenous. I was starting to border on bitchy. I inhaled a bag of chips when I returned to the room and yelled "D! WE HAVE TO EAT NOW!!!" We headed to a restaurant that A had found earlier that day and inhaled sandwiches. We were still hungry afterwards, but we had to go back to the hotel to get ready for the Philharmonic.

At the hotel, D said something like "Man. You were grouchy when you got here. You shouldn't be like that." I think the Women of the World have to an issue a statement to the Men of the World to explain that women go NUTS when they haven't eaten. Why can't men just accept that this is a physiological issue and that there's nothing that can be done short of eating!?!?

Anyway, we had our very own box at Teatro Colon. We were seated in the box next to this extremely grouchy man and his son, but we didn't mind because the Philharmonic was awesome. Here is a view of the theater from our box (photo credit: M):



The members of the Philharmonic were casual. Are philharmonics usually casual? Some of them were wearing jeans:



We headed back to the hotel afterwards because we were wiped out from our day of sitting around. I had no energy. I wanted to get a good, long night's sleep because the next would be... THE WEDDING!