The Local Hair Salon + Nike+iPod

(Monday, Nov. 10th. 10am, in the room)

• Two months have passed since I arrived in London. I went to the local hair salon to get a hair cut on Sunday, November 2nd. This was my first experience. Even when I stayed in Cambridge 10 years ago for 2 months, I have never been to barber's shops in the city. So I was a bit nervous. My chief concern was how I should tell a hairdresser my request of hairstyle. Before going out, I searched on the Internet, as usual, for any useful English phrases which I need in my case. Then, I've learned that I have only to tell him/her "I'd like to have the back and sides tapered, and trim others a bit". Leaving the dormitory, first I walked around the neighbor in search of hair salons. I could find a few by just 20 minutes walking. The first one I entered was very crowded, so the man at the cashier said to me, "Could you come in half an hour?" Replying to it, I headed back to the students' hall. On the way to it, I found another shop where nobody was there except a middle-aged man. The shop looked very tidy and the price list also hung on the wall, so I thought of it as a creditable one, and took the courage to get in there. The man was the barber, who welcomed me kindly. When I said, "I'd like to get a hair cut." he answered, "OK" and led me to the seat. Putting me on the cape, he looked at me in the mirror and tried to ask my request. As I was seeing his actions carefully, I readily spoke out that phrase I had practiced before going out. When I tried to finish the first half of the sentence, namely, "I'd like to have the back and sides tapered...", the man cut in me to say "with the machine?". So I had only to answer, "Yes." He asked then the second question to me. "Which number? 2? or 3?" I had already known that these numbers referred to the length to taper, and that no.1 meant the shortest and no. 4 was the longest prepared for the crew cut, which we call "Sports Cut" in Japanese. Therefore, I immediately responded to it, "No.4, please." "Then, not too short?" was his third question, and I repeated his words to confirm it. These had been the conversation between us before he started to cut my hair. When he finished the task with the machine, he continued to deal with other parts. First he inquired about my request for them. So I told him that I wanted to have them trimmed a bit. It took him about 20 minutes to finish all of his tasks. After wiping hair dusts off the cape, he just said, "Thank you." I stood up and paid £10 to him.
• On Monday 3rd and Friday 7th, I went running to Hyde Park. A few weeks ago, when Japanese Yen was very strong against GBP, I bought a new iPod nano released a few days before and "Nike + iPod" at the official apple store in Oxford Street with my Visa card, because I had always wanted to know especially how much distance and how long I've run everytime I finished working out. When I first used them on Monday, I found these systems wonderful and fantastic. Not only can you listen to your favorite music while you're jogging, but also it let you know the running distance and duration, and pace. Furthermore, you can also learn how much calorie you have consumed in the training. Thanks to these systems, I felt like keeping the exercise. Here I uploaded the latest running log.