I lived in Israel for a year when I was 22, and I must sheepishly admit that I was much more worried about how my hair would look than I should have been. That said, I didn't know too many Israelis with haircuts that looked too good...I was so fearful of getting butchered that I waited something like 4 months before getting a cut.

I found myself in Jerusalem one day with my girlfriend and she insisted that we try a place in the very touristy Ben-Yehuda Street area (Jerusalem's streets are a spaghetti maze to me, but I'm pretty sure the place is on Yoel Soloman or at least one of those pedestrian walks right next to Ben Yehuda)

Anyway, I stepped in and, being a 22 year old xenophobe, was pretty freaked out by the broken Hebrew of the owner, and the fact that the chief barber he assigned me to was Russian, and didn't speak much Hebrew or any English at the time. Keep in mind, this wasn't that long after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Israel was pretty newly swamped with people from the former USSR, and I all could think was "Communist-you-get-what-you-pay-for-Haircut".

My girlfriend would not be dissuaded, though, so I sat down and got one of the best cuts I've ever had. I was so happy with it, and so enjoyed the barbershop banter with the owner, that I made a point of trying to get back there several times during the rest of the year to get another cut.

The follow up to that, however, is that shortly after I returned home to Chicago, I was walking by a bookstore and saw a large coffee table book of pictures (they turned loose photographers for 24 hours) from all over Israel. I flipped it open and immediately landed on a page with the owner of 'my' barbershop standing out in his doorway looking around. I'm not sure if the caption highlighted it or not, but there were scoff marks on the stone wall of his store from a terror attack that had occurred in the interim.

Since then, I've been back for a cut every time I'm ever in Jerusalem. Both the owner and his chief barber were still there last time I was in town, and they always remember me.