Yes, my hair is blonde. No, you do not need to stare.

My hair is very blonde by Georgian standards, though my sister would say that it is not blonde at all. (It is.) Consequently, it makes me stand out...a lot. It makes my desire to blend into the local community much harder than it would be otherwise. It quickly becomes apparent to people that I am not from around here. But it is curious to hear where they think I am from. Often America is not their first guess. Here I am mistaken for being from continental Europe (Germany is popular) or even more bizarrely from Turkey or Azerbaijan. I have never met anyone form Azerbaijan, but judging from the Azeris I have seen getting out of cars by the Sheraton, they do not seem to have blonde hair or light skin.

The blonde hair and very fair skin contrasts significantly to the dark hair and olive skin that most people possess here. Without fail when I open the door to the marshrut'ka, people stare. It is unsettling and rather annoying. Perhaps they are surprised to see someone with naturally blonde hair, as most of the "blonde" hair here is courtesy of Clairol or Loreal. I have seen a few people with lighter hair than me who were not American. But even those people are rare. What is perhaps the funniest part of this story is that my friend, Chanchal, who is Indian gets mistaken for being Georgian. Her host family saw a picture of her before she arrived and thought how Georgian she looked and how she would blend in well in family pictures. The hair and skin are also dead giveaways to the staff of supermarkets that I am not from around here, and consequently, need to be closely followed throughout the entire store. I want to scream at them, "If you want me to buy something, you need to back off!"

The story was much the same in Israel as well. At least in Georgia being foreign did not result in a myriad of shopkeepers trying to get my business, perhaps because there English was spoken much more often. While there I took to wearing scarves and keeping my blonde hair tucked under a hat. It fooled some, but not many. In Israel as well most people did not think I was American, but French, Australian, German, Canadian or Russian. Once my hair provolked an interesting conversation in Jerusalem. While walking past a barber shop in the Old City, the owner offered to give me a haircut. Though after 2 months I desperately needed it, I did not know if a barber shop was the best place for that to happen. He tried to impress me with the fact that he cut the hair for all the Marines at the nearby American consulate, and that he had previously cut the hair of Colin Powell and Barack Obama. While impressive, those facts scared me because none of those people have much hair at all. I did not want a Marine cut in the least.