A lesson in vocabulary

Guiri (pron: ‘girry’) is the term given by the Spanish to tall, usually light-haired foreigners, gringo being the South American Spanish equivelent.  It’s usually said endearingly; but of course it has been known to be followed by spitting and shaking of fists behind one’s back.

*  Wearing Havianas and/or denim shorts and/or looking like me will get you called guiri for sure.

**  Guiri de mierda on the other hand, is not and will never be said endearingly.

***  When asking a male Spanish friend his opinion on why it might be that I found it almost impossible to make friends with Spanish women (and if subsequently, if it was because they thought I was an estúpida guiri de mierda), I was told:

“You’re tall and blonde.  They’re intimidated by you.”

I thought this was a little bit awesome, until he followed with:

“And because of that, you don’t have to be very pretty to stand out.  If you were tanned and dark haired, you’d have to be a lot prettier to get noticed.”

I think he meant this in a nice way.

(Damn language barrier).

Fringe benefits? Not likely. A story of survival at the hairdressers.

I have a fringe now, something which I haven’t possessed since I was six years old and thought capturing garden snails was a valuable past time.

It all came about in an entirely innocent way, going to the hairdressers one afternoon after work, trying to pull together and tick off the myriad of tasks left to do before leaving Sevilla to move to Madrid.  And so I went, off to the first-in-best-dressed type of salon where you walk in and they attend to you according to arrival time.  After waiting for 45 minutes or so (sitting beside a mother and watching the haidresser cut her two young boys’ hair in a manner so meticulous as to suggest she was surgically removing a tumor from each) I began to notice that the gnawing in my stomach I’d been trying to ignore was becoming a full-blown hunger fest.  And that I was developing a please-feed-me headache to match.

“Shit,” I thought, “This can’t be good.”

When one has low blood-sugar, it’s relatively normal to become vague, faint, even bitchy.  I  habitually become all three, except that I also loose the ability to think rationally, or to respond to potentially dangerous situations in an altogether reasonable manner.

Situations such as, looking up to see a hairdresser wielding scissors and asking “Te hago flequillito?”  before you chirp “Sí!” without a second’s thought, not remembering that when too short, a fringe cut out of your hair has a tendency to become poofier than Sandra Dee’s when she turned up all leather-clad at the end of Grease.  And that for this reason you usually do all you can to avoid hairdressers getting all scissor-happy and cutting you a one.

“Como el tuyo,” I wanted to add, “Pero más largo.”  She had, you see, a lovely, sweeping number which fell delicately almost completely across her left eye, leaving a bit of body and bouce (but not too much, mind) on the right side.  It was silky and straight (blowdried, I suspect, within an inch of its life) and gently framed her face as one would hope one’s fringe would.

I, in my near diabetic sugar-low state of unawareness, noticed all the characteristics of her non-fluffy fringe in the second it took me not to respond to her question as I’d planned I might.  I was left, henceforth, to gaze at her in an imbecilic manner, watching as she parted my hair on the wrong side, before whipper-snippering it into the Brazilian wax equivilent of fringes.  The kind that don’t sweep at all – gently or otherwise – but rather bunch together in a fringe/clump not unreminiscent of the much loved ’80’s curl/poof/fringe.  The kind that either look like that, or, when swept to the side look as Jaggered as Mick himself, having seemingly been hacked into from the bottom up.

“Te gusta?”  She asks me.

Low-blood-suger-and-now-quite-painful-headache-Erin doesn’t answer.

“Un poco más, no?” Edwina Scissorhands adds, mistaking my silence for a request for more, and apparently not yet happy with her gardening.

The suggestion plunges me further into a state of shock/silence/hunger.

And so, I left, ten minutes and ten centimetres fringe-less later, to wander the streets of  Sevilla’s quaint and idyllicly Andalúz Santa Cruz looking more like I belonged in hippy La Alameda land, playing a flute and swinging a gangly, cross-bred’s lead while watching it pee against a lampost.