Excuse me...you forgot to rinse

We just returned from a European vacation. The trip provided many potential blog topics including:
• European bathrooms... or 'toilets' as they are called and my adventures in figuring out how to flush the endless of varieties of toilets. (The only version missing was the stick shift.)
• Driving a U.K. car, with the steering wheel on the right (aka wrong) side of the car and all the associated challenges of driving in England and France. In England they drive on left (aka wrong) side of the road, while in France they drive on the right side. But aside from the numerous F-bombs flung from my husband - the driver- and the many near death experiences, the driving experience was as you would have expected... horrific.

What WAS totally unexpected was the man on the train to Paris. I've ridden subways and trains in many cities and have seen a lot of strange people doing very unusual things: bums talking to themselves...bad singers crooning loudly to their I-Pods...drug dealing...children eating spaghetti... men reading porn. You name it. I've seen it. Mass transit mayhem had ceased to shock me.

Until that train ride.

I was sitting on the train to Paris on Christmas Day. A 20-something man stepped into my car and sat two seats up, across the aisle from me. He was typical looking in nearly every way... blue jeans, denim jacket, back-pack on the seat next to him. Typical in nearly every way.
Except for his head.
For, you see, he had shampoo in his hair. On the train.

Now reader, I don't mean that he hadn't rinsed completely and had shampoo flakes on his shoulder. He had shampoo lather throughout his hair. It reminded me somewhat of Lumiere's wig in Beauty and the Beast (except, of course, Lumiere's wig was dry).

I could not take my eye off this sight. Suddenly the man (let's call him "Pierre") glanced over his shoulder and caught me staring at him. I quickly looked away, but was pleased to notice that I could watch his reflection in the window without getting caught. I sat up straighter and watched in wonder.
I had so many questions. Did he know that he had shampoo in his hair? Had he forgotten to rinse? That question was soon answered, as Pierre purposefully moved his hands up to his head and began to massage his head and lather up the shampoo.

Was he running so late that he didn't have time to rinse?

Maybe he just got caught up in the endless "lather, rinse, repeat" loop.

After several stops, when Pierre was looking more like Harpo Marx than Lumiere, he pulled off a wad of lather from his head and applied it to his mustache. He then began to lather his lip.

At this point I shifted from being shocked to being completely entertained. "Hey Dave... pass the popcorn", I said to my husband (who was sitting across from me and missing the entire show.) I mean, what is next? The eyebrows? Could he be heading south? Is this G rated or R rated?

And then it all ended. The train stopped. The man stood, picked up his backpack, and took his lathery head and lip off the train. I felt cheated. My questions were left unanswered.

The only thing I knew for sure is that Pierre's hair would be very clean if he ever got to the rinse step.