Having a Shave in Siem Reap

Andy Hill

I was bumming around Siem Reap for a few days and realized that I might try and give staying there a go. I liked the feel and size of the place much more than I had thought I would, found some cool people to drink with in the evenings and decided that I would see about a way to supplement my income.

I would find a job teaching English at one of the local schools. Even if it were only for a couple of hundred bucks a month, it would still cover most if not all of my expenses. I had a nice-ish pair of brown pants and would be able to source some shirts with collars somewhere for a few bucks.

Time to get rid of the beard

My beard, however, had to go. It was far too long to tackle with a normal razor, and of course I wouldn’t have traveled with a set of electric clippers in my rucksack. So I was going to have to get it shaved at a barber shop. I had never done this before and, faced (pun intended) with the opportunity, became excited about it.

Somewhere around the night market I found a small barber’s stall and walked in. The guys working seemed to perk up at the arrival of a foreigner, and an old man who was having his nose hairs shorn even tried to crane his head to see. A younger man came forward to seat me at his chair and placed one of those thin plastic things over me, making sure that I was comfortable.

He looked like he could have been seventeen-years-old and had never grown as much as a pre-pubescent mustache in his life. I could see from his furtive eye movements and shaking hands that he was nervous. He had probably never shaved himself before, I thought.

He finally got the clippers plugged in and working and with extreme caution raised them to my face. Usually, doing this would take me around thirty seconds, but it was at least ten minutes before he had finished. I was getting exceedingly uncomfortable in the chair. I mean, I didn’t need anything fancy done, but I could tell that the whole ordeal was going to take far longer than my patience was going to allow.

He was visibly relieved to be done with the clippers, but we hadn’t got to the crucial and far more nerve-racking chapter of this saga: the straight razor. He was shaking like a leaf, and I began to get genuinely worried that I would be killed that mid-morning. I tried to tell myself to just trust the process, to not be such a twerp and to just sack up. It didn’t help that at this point we had a small audience.

The dreaded lotion

He got out the shaving cream; or, what looked like shaving cream. It was more like lotion, and not the nice kind that turns into lather when rubbed on stubble but ordinary, old hand lotion.

Pumping some into his palm, he began to apply it to my face, really as if it were the first time. Instead of putting it on with any direction, it was more like he was just touching my face with lotion on his fingers. And the worst part was that he kept touching my lips, which really grossed me out.

I was really squirming around in the chair by the time he had finished doing whatever he had been doing with the lotion. I felt violated. He got out the razor and glanced at the proprietor of the store and the other guys who had gathered to watch, his brow covered in beads of sweat.

He began on my left cheek, scraping the razor as if his life depended on it. It was obvious that mine did as well. It became unbearable. The memory of his touching my lips with that lotion and his other hand now resting for some reason on my neck eventually became too much.

Time stood still. I needed a drink. I needed to get out of there. I had never had a panic attack, but it seemed that this was how they happened.

My escape

When he removed the razor from my face to wipe it off on a towel, I awkwardly and impulsively jumped from the chair, my face half-shaved, looking at my watch in horror as if I had to be somewhere that I had forgotten about.

“Oh my God! It’s one o’clock ALREADY!? I’ve GOT to get going, I am so sorry!” I knew he really didn’t understand, but I made it obvious with my body language.

I shoved some money into his hands as fast as I could, grabbed my backpack and jogged out the door to find anywhere with a glass of whiskey in a dark room.

I didn’t go to find a job that day.