Nail Saloon

Um.. The last time I wore my pearl neckless and ear rings. After dying my hair brown, the elegant assessories strangely fail to do me any good.
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Since I am going to leave for Kuala Lumpur the very next day, I was really anxious to visit the nail saloon as soon as I landed in Beijing. My finger nails have grown too long and the surface is not smooth. Cuticles make the finger nails look filthy, no matter how frequent you wash your hands. I normally don't do any colour, just pure cleaning up and polishing the nail surface with special wax.

The girls in nail saloons are very young and cheerful. They chat with you about trivial matters such as make up, fashion and what type of nail shapes you should have (when they are not trying to sell you another service). This type of human touch is kinda lacking in my daily life.

The saloon I go has a lot of female patrons who work as hostesses (don't raise your eye brow, there are quite a few male customers). They are very interesting to look at while some one is fixing your nails (you cannot even read since both your hands are occupied). I don't see northen Chinese beauties in my working environment, the nail saloon is the perfect place to have a good look of them. They have whiter complexion and taller, excellent skin condition and laugh loudly. You rarely see the southern Chinese women's sensitivity in them. Cool! To the girls, it is normal to spend a couple hundred RMB to have the premium treatment (the average working class make around a couple thousand RMB monthly).

Occassionally some middle age women would turned up as well, could be the mamasan who manages the girls. They often dress very well to their age. But you can tell what type of business they are running just by looking at them. It is very hard to translated into English, but in Chinese we say that they smell of wind and dust. Definitely not the flowers growing up in the green house.