Ch-ch-ch-changes!

Ready?

...

I CUT MY HAIR OFF!

Alright now that you've hopefully gotten over the shock, here's the story:

A few weeks after getting here, I was visiting my friend Kathleen at her flat in London (Kathleen and I have been friends since high school and she goes to Syracuse University- we just happened to be abroad in the same city the same semester!). I don't remember why we started talking about hair. Maybe Kathleen had been thinking of cutting it off already. In any case, we started talking about hair with a couple of her flatmates and they were all convinced the two of us would look awesome with short hair and Kathleen and I started getting excited and brainstorming different short styles that would look good on us. By the end of the night we'd both decided we were going to get our hair cut off together before we went home, and then before we went home turned into sometime while we were here and then it turned into ASAP and then Kathleen went and got her hair cut the next day. :) I wasn't QUITE that impulsive and I sat around for a week thinking it over and getting more and more excited about it- my hair has been around shoulder length or longer basically since I was 5 and decided I was tired with the bowl-cut Mom had been keeping me in for years and wanted to look more "like a girl." Basically I felt like it was time for a change. Also, long hair is a pain in the arse to take care of, especially when it's think like mine. I was kind of tired of it being everywhere. Also, it just feels easier to do something new and crazy like this in a different country- my friends here have known me for about a month, so they're not attached to my hair and probably won't kill me/freak out if I drastically change my appearance. On the other hand, they've known me long enough to know that this is a big change and comment accordingly which is nice :) There's nothing worse than getting a new haircut and having no one notice :-P

So long story short I went to the same salon Kathleen went to this past Saturday- the "Pop-In" Hair Salon in Kennington and ended up with the same stylist she'd had- a really fun middle-aged mom who was really excited by the prospect of "scalping" someone as she called it. (Sounds a bit violent....) It only cost me about 17 pounds! Afterwards, I went to Kathleen's and we took pictures of our new hair together (which you can see to the right). The other picture is one I took of myself when I was playing around with how to style it. I'm a fan of the messy, tousled look. :)

SO that's the current big news of the week. I'm still having a great time, my friends are fantastic, and my classes are interesting (the papers are somewhat less interesting- I miss being able to elect my own topic, but oh well).
OH and I'm going to Paris on Thursday for 4 days. I keep forgetting about that. Weird.

I'm off to class!

I hope you enjoy the pictures :) I'll probably add more to my Picasa album soon so you can get the full effect.