On Wednesday, I needed to get a haircut for an interview on Thursday and seeing that I was hanging out downtown to go to play bingo for Trish’s birthday, and the fact that Vero was not around to cut my hair, it only made sense to seek out a barber shop.
I asked Ben for any tips on places to get a cut on Elgin Street and he pointed me towards a shop he went to across from the Pizza Pizza. Lo and behold, I spied the barber shop pole outside and entered…
And found a corner store. But not just ANY corner store…one with a barbershop taking up the back half! There was one barber cutting away and so I sat down and waited next to another gentleman and when the second barber was done serving at the cash, he came in and the gentleman next to me said I could go ahead as he was waiting for the other barber to be done.
Warning bells went off in my head…”Is the other guy THAT good? Should I also be waiting for him? Is there something wrong with Barber #2?” I conceded to the fact that I couldn’t very well say no this person’s offer so I sat down and asked for a trim. I’ve been out of the barber shop for so long that I couldn’t even remember what a tapered back meant!
All was going well although I was in the mood to chat and this barber most certainly was not. But then a strange thing happened. Someone came into the corner store and my barber put down the clippers and went and processed their lottery ticket. The bells go off, ‘Winner, Gagnant’ is cried and the person walks out with their meager winnings and the barber comes back, takes a look at my head with a look on his face saying “Now where was I?” and then starts all over because he can’t really remember.
This happens fifteen other times and I must admit that I am quite the patient person in life but I’m sure glad I had nowhere to go in a rush! I also believe that because of these customers coming in, my hair is probably a lot shorter than it originally was planned to be!
Nonetheless, it did not look bad at all. I paid the gentleman, went to the Sir John A pub down the street (which is excellent for the reason that it has some great fish and chips and carries Mill Street beer on tap) and then Krista, Ben, Jill and I headed to Vanier Bingo.
Now, I’ve never been to a bingo hall before, or at the very least, none that I can remember. Perhaps my mother frequented the bingo halls in Fraserdale and that’s how my education was paid for, but I’ll never know until she reads this and writes back to me.
On a random side note, may I point out that I don’t know how to take the email from my father the other day. It said something like “Hello, can you check out the price of ‘object x’ in Ottawa. By the way, four working days left. – Dad.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but to say this to someone who probably has 728,199 more working days left in him, this is just uncalled for! Sure, I’m happy for him approaching retirement, but Dad, lay off the emails will you? 🙂
Anyhow, so we enter this bingo hall and it was another world altogether. Or…pretty well like what you imagined. People strewn across tables with good luck tokens, a bag full of bingo dabbers and yesterday’s best attire. We went to the counter and asked how bingo worked and she spewed out some information that still didn’t make any sense to us so we decided to buy a ‘regular’ sheet for $10.50. Near the middle of of night we realized how the other bingo games worked and bought a few more. This was solely to push off extreme boredom as there was one game where they played ‘full card’ which meant that you had to dab every spot on the card to win and I figured if I didn’t have that playing card, I would have been sitting there for 30 minutes looking around.
When I say looking around, I really mean it. As in, I would be silent. I thought bingo would be a rocking fun time chatting with old ladies next to me and threatening to dab B11 on their card when the ball came up…but no. The place was like a morgue. We got glares whenever one of us would speak to one another, so we had to laugh in hushed whispers. It was quite surreal but I realized that regular bingo players take their night quite seriously.
In the end, no one at our table won anything but Trish ended up getting a piece of cake and a free bingo bad filled with bingo paraphenelia which was quite nice of the bingo hall. Heck, the woman delivering the bag even kissed her!
So all in all, I must admit that I’ve always wanted to try bingo, but I don’t think I really care to try it again. I found it a little boring and at times I swear I was falling asleep. This is not to say that I did not have a fun night (as Trish is probably thinking right now!) but it’s just to say that bingo ain’t my thing.