Lost in Translation

An embarassing, but yet funny enough story that it must be shared...

Since I arrived here, I have been plagued by static electricity--wearing heavy winter clothes all the time in a rather dry climate creates a lot of it. As such, every time I take off my hat, half of my hair stands up on end. So, since I've arrived I've been thinking of trying to find some kind of hair product that would help with that--in particular mousse, I thought, would be just the thing. Of course, how to say "mousse" in Russian--I hadn't yet figured out. Well, the other day, as I was taking a shower, I noticed that one of the other girls who uses the same shower had a bottle of something called, in Russian, "moos." and then something about hair, but I didn't look too closely or pay too much attention, assuming it must what I was looking for.

Well, a bit later, again frustrated by my hair, I decided she wouldn't mind if I took just a touch of it. I sprayed it onto my hand, and indeed it looked like mousse, so I put a bit in my hair to just flatten it down. The first thing I noticed was that it smelled absolutely terrible. Thinking, what kind of strange Russian mousse is this, I tried to pull a brush through my hair so that it spread through a bit more. But I couldn't even pull the brush through my hair--it seemed to have become completely like straw. Still not thinking it might not actually be mousse (I never use hair products at home, so I'm not used to what the results ought to be), I washed it out of my hair--I had to wash it three times and my hair still smelled a little.

Next, when I was brushing my hair, I noticed that my lap became covered with small pieces of hair--I thought, that's odd but was in a hurry by this time and didn't really pay attention. Later that evening, I was telling the girl who's bottle it was about her strange mousse--she looks at me with this pained expression on her face. "You put that in your hair?" she says, "Susan, that's not mousse..." It turns out that rather than mousse, it was "moos dlya ydaleniya volosi"--meaning, cream for getting rid of hair--that is, the stuff like Nair, that you put on your legs to dissolve your leg hair instead of shaving. So, not only was it not helping my hair to lay flat, it was actually dissolving it!

Fortunately, I didn't use very much, so it could have been far far worse. As it is, I'm still brushing small pieces of hair out whenver I brush my hair and, if you look closely you can see that I've got quite a lot more shorter hairs, flyaways, but it's not really noticeable to anyone but me. Of course, the static has actually gotten worse because of the top layer of short hairs that all stand up straight when I pull off my hat. But, they will grow long again and I've at least got a funny story to tell...