Cordoba, Monday

Mon 2158 Pretty quiet day. Woken up about 8am by what I think may have been fire alarm (not very like those in UK) but it had stopped by time I realised what it was/might be and had pulled clothes on.

Had a WhatsApp msg (voicemail!) for me from BA flat about internet being out and offering to provide me with a SIM for phone to tide me over. Felt irrationally crap but felt I needed to reply immediately since they asked if I understood or needed in English so said I had just been woken up by fire alarm and felt tired and needed to reply in few hours.

Must have gone back to sleep for hour or two but not sure. Got up. The few museums I checked online all shut Mon - why do *all* museums shut the same day? Seems like it would make more sense to scatter the shut day if they all must shut one day a week. It's not presumably like all the museum staff are married to each other and need the extra day off together.

Power bank hardly charged again overnight. The USB/power situation is getting a bit fraught. Have been taking more out of power bank than I can get in - think it actually died on me while topping up phone tonight. Phone hasn't been above about 75% for days. I honestly don't know what's going on.

Yes, the new USB cable is cheap and may not allow a large charge current so power bank charges slowly. But it seemed to be charging slowly via the "good" cable before it went dodgy too - maybe it was slowly dying. Could my charger or the power bank also be on the fritz? The phone charges at the rate of about 1% every three minutes from power bank while I can maintain it propped up so the dodgy USB connector and dodgy short old yellow USB cable work - is the phone broken beyond the USB connector, or is the poor connection/poor cable just limiting the charge current? Maybe a hard reset of phone would fix things but maybe it wouldn't and I really don't want to lose my data etc while can't conveniently back it up. I can't be sure but I think the phone simply won't charge (it shows connected but the battery level gradually goes down) from the charger.

Been massively overdosing on Youtube because I have (v sluggish) smart TV which runs off mains which I can use while phone charges very very slowly; no way can I use phone while it charges, both because it gets so little charge even with no in-use extra power drain and because of the dodgy USB connector/cable.

(FWIW the new cheap USB cable doesn't seem to cooperate very well in terms of balancing the phone to work round the dodgy connector; I can get the charging indicator to show briefly but not had any success propping phone up. Maybe just not tried enough. Whether it will actually charge through that cable if I can do this is another matter.)

I went out for a walk about 2pm (?) sort of round the "ring road" around the river and through the centre of town. Nice enough (though overcast and light rain) and getting out of flat felt good but hardly felt like I was really getting "value" out of being here. Did see a few bars round Plazoleta Not-Named-On-Google-Maps-At-Least-Offline nearish to Obispo Trejo tho obviously all quiet at that time of afternoon and most shut.

In hindsight I "should" have looked eg in 2010 guide book and gone out Fri/Sat night even if just sat alone to feel a bit of "life" . I think the location of this flat is a bit suboptimal from this perspective, need to get taxi back plus fairish walk to get out there doesn't help. Could in principle make an effort tonight or next few nights but don't expect much night life early in week (intuition + wikitravel says that too, FWIMBW). Have to kind of hope I can improve my "activity" in BA. Keep telling myself I "should" be doing more and socialising more, but why "should" I? How is this going to come about?

I cooked at flat again, I did see a few OKish but nothing special restaurant/coffee bar places but after feeling I "ought" to eat out I laughed at myself and thought that really there's nothing super exciting about eating chicken+chips in some small half-empty cafe.

Cunt on street almost certaintly barged into me as I stood peering at a menu (admittedly perhaps blocking narrow street by accident, but he made no effort to tap me on shoulder or ask me to move) and shortly after another cunt pushed in front of me at queue in supermarket (not my usual one). Meh.

Been having quiet afternoon/evening in since got back from that maybe 1h45 walk. This is hardly living the dream but I need to stop making myself feel shit about it.

Oh, before I headed out for walk BA flat got back to me to say internet should be fixed before I arrive anyway so nothing to worry about there.

Oh, I also had a quick look on web and meetup.com re language exchanges here but AFAICT there's no group language exchange, there are web sites which act like kind of dating agencies to pair people up for 1-1 conversation but not really looking for that right now (eg I might end up with a long-term commitment to carry on via Skype and I don't want to walk casually into that). There is *maybe* an English-only event tomorrow night (though no location given and since meetup.com apparently won't let me change my location from Santiago, though I can search within say 50 miles of Cordoba, which I did, so it may be in Santiago or some small town 10 miles from here) which says native speakers can come and help others with English but apart from uncertainty over location it has a name like "English Mate" or something and maybe that's like Yerba Mate or maybe it has some weird dating vibe, it really wasn't clear. I just may try to check that page again tomorrow to see if a location is specified and just *may* go if it's in Cordoba but I'm not super excited to.

While I can see why I was tempted to get an apartment after a relative surfeit of dorms (mostly non-social too), in hindsight I should perhaps have  paid more attention to where the bars are and gone for a ho(s)tel private room in a more "happening" location and then I'd have been more tempted to go out Fri/Sat night. To some extent I try not to drink too much etc but that also stops me going out in the evenings in a way which is perhaps a bit dull; even if I *don't* get chatting to anyone (and I'm often nervous about that happening) it's still a chance to see some nightlife and feel I'm "experiencing" the country/city in a way I'm not squatting in my apartment here. The location of the apartment isn't bad but for me the taxi thing is a major buzz kill. Especially the first night or two when I hadn't got the feel for the city layout and flat location I do now after a few days walking around.

Obviously being able to cook for myself is an advantage of having a flat and it does probably help me eat more healthily (esp wrt fruit and vegetables), I am not sure this is enough of an advantage - especially when I knew I would have an apartment in BA so could cook for myself then and I had done a modest amount of cooking for myself not all that long ago.

Meh. It is what it is, I don't feel terrible, I just kind of feel I have/am wasting my time in Cordoba - this is the second largest city in the country but to me it's feeling kind of dead because of how I'm spending my time.

And though it's not a huge thing the power drought also makes me reluctant to go out much at night; I don't have that much power to burn to allow me to read on phone if I am alone at a bar/cafe (obviously not always a good idea from socialising POV but still a habit of mine) and I'm also worried the thing will go dead or at least scarily low before I get home.

FWIW now 2225, was writing the above mostly continuously.

2230 I am semi-enjoying my YT binge but I'm definitely overdoing it. I should maybe be getting some quality time in with my own brain, but I'm not, partly because I don't want to start ruminating unhelpfully about random shit. I have no entertainment other than the phone (web browser, e-books, music) and the smart TV, which is painful enough for YT and virtually unusable for web browsing.

As mentioned other day been mixing up the very nerdy stuff with some survivaly/campingy stuff and verging onto the whole prepper scene. While I don't feel myself being drawn into the prepper stuff (though OTOH a lot of the guys I'm watching don't seem to be as stereotypically crazy as I'd have expected; I kind of think what they're doing is not a great effort/reward trade off - in theory this stuff might save your life, but you spend half your life preparing and the odds of the disaster happening are maybe 10% tops, so is it worth it? I can see some value in an 80/20 rule kind of way of being prepared for eg a few days of temporary utility/medical/law-and-order failures after a natural disaster or localised riot, but to my mind prepping for n months or indefinite post-apocalypse-ish stuff doesn't seem rational - but ultimately if it's their "hobby" and they enjoy it (which helps get rid of the "waste half your life" aspect of my trade off calculation above) where's the problem?), the continual talk of disasters and bugging in and bugging out has a vaguely corrosive effect on my peace of mind and I start to visualise myself holing up in my London flat alone with no power or water for days with scammers trying to get me to open the door and it's a scary prospect; I'm not saying it's likely or that I intend to take serious action to "guard against" it, but it has that "reading creepy stories in bed" vibe. But it is vaguely interesting and as waffled the other day I have picked up one or two small tips which might be useful in my everyday life or when travelling; I've discarded a ton of (to me) useless (if sometimes entertaining and/or corrosively disturbing) information to pick up these tips but that's kind of fine, because really this is just a YT binge and it's not like I have a lot else to do right now.