Quetzaltenango, Monday

1420 In restaurant near flat getting half chicken (Q40) and a Q5 tamarind juice. Bit expensive but meh.

School OK but feel strangely off-balance. Have agreed to go on some day trip leaving 6am Thursday costing Q150 to a kite festival which occurs once a year some 3h away. Thu is day of the dead or similar so no classes, even though we pay the same for the week's lessons. This feels out of order, but nothing to to be done about it. I probably wouldn't have tipped my teacher anyway given he said I shouldn't tip people in restaurants and his family is expensive, but since I'm paying the school - and I hope him, indirectly, rather tahn the school trousering the money - for a day of classes I'm not actually receiving I'll mentally also set that aside as a pseudo tip.

Plan for this afternoon is just to wander down towards El Calvario/cemetery for an hour or so for exercise and to generally sightsee, then will have quiet evening in and do homework.

I may have punctuation in wrong place but think this place is called Q'Nais. Food pretty good, feel quite stuffed. Still a bit off-balance.

1712 Washed fleece. Massive effort required rinsing the thing maybe 7 times, water still seemed a bit dirty even then. Still, the sink here is rock solid so I can use both hands, and it's all exercise... It's drying on the balcony now, zipped round the chair just in case the wind gets up.

I asked my teacher about washing dishes with tap water, I don't *think* I persuaded him to tell me what I wanted to hear but he seemed to come down on the side of "it's OK if they dry thoroughly" and "(cheap) restaurants will be doing exactly that".

He also thought the people at K&Q on Saturday night might have been "interested" to talk to me but were reluctant to intrude, though ultimately who knows.

Apparently there are three Salon Tecuns, one of which is just round the corner from the one on Pasaje Enriquez, is bigger and also has live music.

1738 Just been out on balcony and took a load of photos of quite impressively orangey sunset over mountains view. Whether I'll ever get to play with them and perhaps merge a few together as "HDR" and/or panoramas I don't know. But a pretty cool view all the same. Going to go stare at it camera-less for a bit...

(Took some more photos earlier when it was sunnier and brigher. Will probably take billions over week I'm here and hope I get one or two good ones by chance... ;-) )

Someone is playing a brass instrument badly/practising somewhere off in the distance, and has been for a while. Strangely atmospheric.

1752 Having had *quick* poke on web for language exchange here, it looks like Duolingo had some group events here in September but noting since. There are websites which purport to pair you up for a one-on-one meeting with people to exchange languages; that might be good but might also be a bit awkward - I am not sure, need to mull it over.

2345 Pissed night away making myself feel shit reading crap on (mostly) Twitter. You fuckwit Steve. Did homework very late and not as well as could have done. Oh well. Just had shower. Managed to turn it off OK. Really hate showering in Guatemala; water always a trickle and never that hot, and at least at this time of year where I've been it always feels just that bit cold in the room after you get out of the shower all wet. Not an enormous thing but a persistent small psychological drag. Obviously I'm not in the sunniest frame of mind right now (but I'm not on the verge of slitting my wrists either), but I have felt this about showering a lot. Just drying off a bit before getting into bed.

While it's ultimately my fault, I think continual raising of political stuff in conversation with my teacher contributed to Twitter reading binge. Meh. It's all good practice at dealing with this shit.

I do incidentally feel a bit inhibited speaking Spanish outside class as every lesson it seems I learn something I've been saying is either wrong or slightly rude or both. I guess in a way this is good but it's making me even more hyper-conscious of what I'm saying which as I say is inhibiting. Meh squared.

Fleece not quite dry yet but I think it will be wearable tomorrow at a push.

I think I am feeling a bit lonely but as always I am not doing all I could to overcome this so I can hardly complain. On the other hand, I am not entirely sure what I even *want* - if I could snap my fingers and my social life would organise itself magically exactly as I wished, what would it look like? I have no idea. I'm not allowed to drink beer more than one or two evenings a week, do I really want to sit around drinking coffee in the evening with whoever? I'm normally quite happy spending time on my own, maybe because in London it's just that bit more comfortable sitting around at home with my computer with nice big monitor and my books and my armchair etc. Perhaps it's more that I don't know where my next social interaction is coming from - if I felt I could reliably predict social events, even if they were only once or twice a week, that might well make all the difference. Meh cubed. It's late and I've had a mildly shitty evening and probably not in best frame of mind to address this. Just feels like I "should" be having more fun, even though I'm not quite sure what that would look like.

(For example, I am far from clear I would recognise any other students if I turned up to the pub quiz on Thursday at El Shamrock, and given the way most of them turned up in a big group last week I would arguably wonder if I'd be intruding on them - would be different if they drifted in a few at a time and/or I actually knew some of them.)