Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Hijacked!

As I arrived at my apartment after the usual Tuesday night CS shoot em up, I was accosted by the guy on the left (see the photo above). He seemed a bit drunk but maybe he was just full of the joys of life. Anyway he's hanging outside the newly opened shop which I've just discovered is a skin clinic. We get chatting and I take off my helmet because his English is broken and I figured he could understand me better if he saw my mouth. The usual niceties come forth, you are so handsome etc, etc but they are suddenly VERY concerned about my skin (which isn't great admittedly). Well, next thing I know I'm laying on this bed getting a full facial cleansing by some famous skin expert (who everyone refers to as the 'teacher'). It was BIZARRE to have 10 strange faces peering intently down at my inflamed pores. It gets better. No one can understand me properly so he phones a female friend of his who's English was better. She asks me

'do you want your pimples to disappear?'.
'Of course'
'the teacher will make them go away'
'Great!'

So she gets going with her tweezers pulling out stuff and squeezing stuff. There are 'ooh's and 'ah's from the nice little crowd gathered around my bed.

Halfway through this, she tries to tell me something, which I obviously can't understand so I speak to phone lady again. It emerges that If I want my pimples to disappear, I need to pay NT$12000. That's R2,229.31 at today's exchange rate. Just like that. The crowd seemed genuinely surprised that I didn't have it in my pocket!
So the facial stopped, and negotiations with phone lady started up again. I ended up buying a tub of some special cleanser that will apparently make 'my pimples disappear' It will last one year I'm told so I didn't feel too bad forking out NT$1000 or R185 for it.

That's my weird story for the evening.
Bye.

1 comment:

~ said...

ahaha.. this is funny.