For a brief time yesterday I became a
money saving expert but before I rebrand myself as Martin Lewis, John Lewis or
that Dom bloke off the telly read on.
Thanks to Malaysia Day on Tuesday Edwin’s piano lesson was postponed so the marvellous people at Menuetto Music of Desa Park City rearranged his lesson for Friday evening at 7.00pm. So after playing football, badly as usual, I hobbled over to The Waterfront with the lad in good time for his lesson. To fill in the 30 minutes I decided that it was high time I took my flowing locks in for a bit of a restyle and snip. Edwin dashed on ahead and I stopped briefly to natter with a colleague who was enjoying the evening heat. We swapped niceties and discussed my fine number of hairs etc and soon got round the idea of the price of hairdos. She was shocked at the RM50 that I was preparing to pay and so pointed me in the direction of another barber who cut her husband and son’s Barnets. Dismissing it as a next time thing I wished her a good evening and went on to the hairdressers, where the stylist (yes, hard to believe the idea of me visiting a stylist, I know) told me that they were experiencing a bit of a rush and so I would need to wait 20 minutes. That gave me some vital thinking time during which I followed that dreadful Americanism and “Did the Math.”
Consequently yesterday afternoon Rupert and I followed my colleague’s directions to Damansara Perdana and found the barber who she claimed her men swear by. We parked in a nearby place which also offered car cleaning, inside and out for RM20, so decided to have the Trajet transformed from grubby specimen into gleaming Rolls Royce while a barber attempted something similar on Rupert and I
The barber was eating his lunch as we stepped into his air-conditioned booth under a staircase and so he asked us to come back after he had finished. That gave Rupert and I time to seek out drinks, namely an iced lemon tea for the boy and a ubiquitous teh tarik for me. On return the barber did his stuff with the flair of a master craftsman and left us both looking much less hairy and pleasingly not much lighter about the wallet.
We returned to collect our now shining charabanc and drove back to Chateau Lawrence. In addition to being a money saving experience the events of the afternoon also afforded Rupert Lawrence an opportunity to practice his fledgling maths skills. He assured me that RM20 for the car cleaning, RM18 for our haircuts, RM2 for the tip to the barber, RM2 for his iced lemon tea, RM1.40 for my teh tarik and RM1.50 for the car parking all came to RM44.90, leaving a pleasing amount change from the planned RM50 for one haircut that I had almost purchased the day before.
Shopping around, plus local knowledge is clearly the way forward. especially as we are in the process of trying to sort out accommodation for our Christmas and New Year holiday in Sydney. (Does anyone have any relatives or friends that we could borrow, please?) The flight prices were too good to turn down so I booked and paid for them yonks ago, but finding sensible priced accommodation is not proving quite so easy. Lexi managed to book places for us in a YHA for the first five nights and we have then found a reasonable priced campervan to hire for the second section of our tour. The most tricky part of the accommodation search is the last three nights, over the new year period. Every reasonably priced place has a minimum booking period of between five and fourteen nights. We need three. Alternatively we are being told by various websites that we can have posh hotels from between 600 to 3000 pounds for those nights.
It is a good job that Rupert and I saved RM5.10 yesterday. That pound might yet come in very useful.