How do you say ‘Not too short’ in another language? At the hairdresser in a foreign country

For women who travel a lot or live overseas, one of the biggest challenges is finding a good hairdresser. They need to speak your language so English is essential. That’s the only way to guarantee you’ll get a perfect cut, or is it?

After several years travelling in different countries I was based in Portugal and could ignore my hair no longer. It had finally grown out after three disastrous haircuts. The first was in Australia, the land of my birth and place of my mother tongue. The second was in Turkey where I lived for ten years. I went to the same hairdresser I’d been seeing, as though it were an affair, for five years. We always spoke in Turkish and until that last cut, I had nothing but perfection from him. I suffered the third cut in the tourist centre of Bangkok, at a salon where everything was written in near perfect English. On each occasion I walked out with a style nothing what like I asked for and far too short. With the weight of my hair removed its natural body pulls it up above my ears and unless I smile, I look like an extremely threatening prison guard. I was worried about a repeat in Lisbon but my hair was down around my shoulders and made me look like I was sporting a discarded bird’s nest on my head.