Just a little off the top...

A humorous take on learning a new place and navigating the quirks of trying to find an extension cord.

I was due for a haircut.

I’ve seen a lot of barber shops around Rotterdam, most bustling, but I embraced my follicular challenges several years ago and have been doing my own for some time. The parts of my hair that still grow seem to do so straight out, meaning the top stays short but the back and sides start to make my head look increasingly round or, at the very least, wider. I used to shave my head in college, where my look was the inspiration for a character in a campus comic: “Lightbulbhead Boy.”

Until my mid-twenties, I’d been mercilessly cheap on hair, using places like Cost Cutters until a dear friend told me she would disown me if I didn’t get a decent cut just once. There are a lot of things in this world that I don’t understand and the ability to visualize a finished style while working with the medium that is human hair has always baffled me. It’s a bit of witchcraft I just can’t make sense of, as evidenced by the age-old maxim that you can never make it look that way again at home.

For years, I wore what I jokingly called my crown of thorns, short on the sides and long and spiky on top. I leaned in hard, styling my hair with wax, defying gravity and resigning me to the land of earmuffs no matter how cold the weather got. I’ve seen photographs of my maternal grandfather so I didn’t really have any illusions about making it to old age with a full head of hair but it was still a matter of pride.

On a (financially ill-advised) whim, I did a year of graduate school in Oklahoma City and was required to audition for the main stage productions. I was cast as Frank Lubey, the balding astrologist in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. The script specified that he was losing his hair, something at which a twenty-something me bristled. The director asked me to shave myself more or less of a monk’s tonsure and I refused.

The drag queen who was my guardian angel during those years showed me the power of a glue stick and for the whole of that run, I would glue my hair down, dry it, and then apply makeup over it. And still, I wondered if the loss was entirely genetic or not…

Time was, I would have landed here in the Netherlands and spent time on the computer researching where to find a stylist and a salon that carried my preferred brand of overpriced styling products (I found dozens during my touring years). I clung to my hair and the same hairstyle for far too long, having now seen photos from side and rear angles.

Still, I didn’t return to my undergrad “utilitarian beauty” because of the balding, it was really a matter of prioritizing…or a lack thereof. For our fifth wedding anniversary, we splurged on the honeymoon we never took (a long weekend with KFC was all we managed at the time) and spent a glorious week in Barcelona.

I wanted to get my hair cut before we left.

I planned to get my hair cut before we left.

The night before our flight, my hair was still not cut.

So, I asked William to help me shave it off, thinking this was as good a time as any to embrace the direction nature was taking me, especially in light of the fact that I’d been massaging rosemary oil on my pate to absolutely no avail (besides a fragrant and stained pillowcase). I figured a week in Spain around strangers would at least let me come to terms with the loss of that part of my life before I had to deal with everyone else’s feelings about how I looked.

Since then, a haircut’s been a matter of taking a few minutes in our bathroom to use the electric shaver and vacuum cleaner to transfer the growth from my head to the wastebasket…but we left the US-style plug version (trusty and well-abused) behind when we moved. I used it two weeks ago and let it go…

What good was it going to be to live our new lives with adapters in every outlet?

I’ve mentioned before that shopping here still favors a more traditional model of a store that specializes in some things and does not carry others. This means that if you want a big selection of toothpaste, you go to a store that sells those kinds of things instead of the two options available in the grocery (because they sell food first and foremost). I’d done my best to navigate the Goo-Goo and off we went in search of clippers at three different “winkels.”

The head shaver we found was cheap, purposefully, but I was delighted we found it on the first try (for anyone else who is “op zoek,” try Action - only €12,95). In the United States, they always come with nearly every piece wrapped in its own little plastic sac. Here, the shaver and its attachments were all packed into little waxed paper bags which begs the question: if they can produce them using recyclable materials, why don’t they?

Side note: the Dutch are serious about recycling and will fine you if you don’t do it properly.

Bringing the shaver back to our rental, I was dismayed to realize that there is no outlet in the bathroom. In fact, there are precious few that aren’t already occupied with lamps, the television, or our new tea kettle. I considered shaving my head over the kitchen sink (where there’s a free outlet next to the water source) or over a towel on the floor by the front door, but decided we needed an extension cord.

If you’re in the US, close your eyes and imagine the closest place near you where you could find one and you’ll probably think of five, including the closest gas station or CVS. Here in Nederland, not so much. You can get multi-outlet power strips everywhere, but those only have a little reach to them. William offered to daisy chain several of them to reach the bathroom which I declined, figuring we would always find a use for an extension cord as long as we’re living in the EU.

Google’s shopping algorithms haven’t cracked the code on the Netherlands and if you search for things, you have a half-way decent chance of not finding them. Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, “I have not failed 1000 times. I have successfully discovered 1000 ways not to make a lightbulb.” As much as I abhor glorifying Edison given the dirty underhanded trickery he used to demonize Nikolai Tesla and damned all of the US to paying far more for less efficient energy, I do like the sentiment in this quote as applied to shopping in the Netherlands: I haven’t failed to find a bottle of turmeric, I’ve simply found 1000 places where you can’t.

That said, I did discover this and expect to return when they’re open in order to report on all the odds and ends that CAN be found:

One of the other items that’s been on our shopping list was one of those trolleys you see “city folks” pulling behind themselves on the street. Until I navigated the walk and tram ride back to the apartment carrying a massive bag of cat litter, I never understood the utility. I’ve always had a car and, up until a few weeks ago, routinely shopped at suburban shopping centers before backing up to my front door.

We see the helpful little carts everywhere on the streets but virtually nowhere in the stores. William looked up the Dutch word—”boodschapentrolley”—which basically means errand hauler. After several searches, he finally found a shop whose website said they had them, and I set out with our list of essentials: toilet paper, a trolley, and an extension cord.

I went to the first location, near the center of the city, only to find the windows papered over. I tried a couple of other shops nearby, in hopes that our searches had missed something...no luck. In the hardware store, I found plenty of options that only had the female end and you were meant to make the male connections on your own using the bare wires.

I am NOT an electrician; I’m barely a hair stylist.

We’re still new enough here that I really don’t mind walking a mile out of my way on a whim. There’s plenty of the city to see and even one block to the north or south gives an entirely different experience. From the shuttered location, I went towards the west end where there was another branch. Apple Maps said both the west and the central one were open today. Google said both were still in operation; however, upon reaching the second shop I found the same papered windows as I had downtown.

Something tells me that chain isn’t doing well...everyone already seems to have their carts!

Ready to give up on finding one and resolved to ask the next person I saw where in the hell they bought the damn thing, I spun around Mathenesserplein in the vain hope of salvaging today’s shopping trip. There was a florist, a grocer (which I also needed to visit for TP), and…wait…is that?

Across from the mosque, I found an immigrant-run all-sorts shop, the kind of place that can’t afford a Google listing and certainly doesn’t have a website you can search. Dutch banks operate using Maestro for their debit cards, reducing the usability of Visa, Mastercard, and Amex outside of the tourist-favored zones, so I was trepidatious but after confirming, I was probably the happiest person to purchase a boodschrappentrolley in the history of the joint.

A further pass through their aisles also yielded a roll of the elusive duct tape and a 3m extension cord!

I celebrated by loading up with a multipack of toilet paper and other groceries before tootling myself home, proud as punch to walk through the streets dragging a little canvas bag on a metal frame instead of shuffling reusable shopping bags up my shoulders every few blocks and hoping the schoolchildren wouldn’t see the rolls of toilet paper sticking out of them.

Several hours later, my head now occupies significantly less volume in your peripheral and I am newly resolved to ask people, rather than computers, where I can find things from here on out because, as this building says when inclusively translated, “the environment of humans is humanity.”

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