Málaga: cualquier dia

I'm sitting in a coffee shop I found by typing "coffee shops where you can sit with your laptop" into a search. Surprisingly few people, surprisingly friendly staff. I would not have found this coffee shop myself, it is located in the nooks and crannies of the tourist ghetto - the historic center of the city.

I've been here for a few days and I live in the center of the tourist ghetto, constantly a lot of people with backpacks and suitcases, constantly packed cafes, three, four times overpriced tapas and beer. I get dizzy when I try to walk around because of the people around me. So I'm thinking of spending the last few days occupying a small green lawn by one of the palm trees on the beach and spending half the daylight hours there. The other half I'll spend in a cafe eating breakfast and getting to the beach. I'm thinking about walking to the botanical gardens, but it seems too far and there are highways and it's a question of whether I can cross them. In front of me is my experience with maps in Georgia and where I had to make a huge circle to avoid being killed on the highway the map suggested I cross. Maybe I'll just get a bus, I haven't decided yet.

These days I'm completely alone. A few times I opened Couchsurfing and thought about meeting someone or writing to someone, but I have no energy for that - no energy to interact with new people. To be more precise, with new people with whom intaraction will not be very pleasant, not like it had been with V., for example. And there's no way to check it in advance, we'll have to meet. But to be honest, I don't really care right now. My general emotional state is very depressed, I sleep 10 hours a night. In the past I would try to think of something to cheer myself up and think positive, but now I don't really feel like it. I know things will get better after a while. I'll meet my brother in two weeks, we'll travel, I'll go back to Yerevan and concentrate on applying for my master's program. Everything will be fine. Right now everything is bad because I lost my potential best friend. I don't know when we will meet again and whether we will communicate and become real friends someday, but I obviously can't sit around and wait for it. It may not happen and it's best to treat it like it won't.

I'm going to Granada in three days, I need to get moving so I don't go crazy in Malaga. Even though there's a beach, cheap coffee and lots of sunshine, it's overly crowded. I don't like that. Or maybe I should move to a new neighborhood. But that doesn't help much, because the only way I can distract my brain is to give it a new puzzle to solve - a new city.

The puzzle is that you have to find tourist ghettos, places where people of average means live, "bad" neighborhoods, neighborhoods with cheap markets, neighborhoods with souvenirs, calculate the average price for breakfast by comparing it in a cafe where menus are presented in all the languages of the world and in a cafe where the menu is written in Spanish and on a board displayed at the door of the cafe. I love new cities and there is nothing more interesting that can occupy my brain than being able to explore the life of the average resident of the city I'm in. Or someone like me. Or maybe my life as it might have been in that city had I been born there.