Rant

Possibly because I have had a headache for a whole week, and possibly because I made it worse by going out with the girls last night for several Cuba libras, but today everything seems irritating.

So, for your reading pleasure, here is a list of everything I hate about Guatemala:

1) The altitude and pollution here mean that I have had a continuous headache since I got back from Costa Rica with its clean air and lower altitude. I had this when I first got here and it lasted for 2 weeks. One more week to go it seems until I get my head back :o(

2) The music. There is no music scene in Guatemala. Aspiring musicians have to leave the country to find a recording studio, and the result is that there isn't really any music scene here. T and I bought a little radio but the radio stations here play the most apalling music. It's not that they play traditional guatemalan music, and I am being an ignorant bigot. They play literally anything they can get hold of, which is typically Stevie Wonder's 'I just called to say I love you' Honestly! At least 4 times per day. I haven't heard anything that was recorded after 1982. It's not possible to find classical music anywhere either. When I left the UK I decided to bring absolutely nothing of value in case it got stolen.

People have been astonished at the tinyness of my backpack for 6 months of living here, but I have always felt great that I need so little. Now I snarl at people who are travelling with their IPods. Thousands of tracks of lovely music there for them whenever they want them. I feel like I am crawling around in a desert, with my tongue dragging on the sand, with barely a molecule of water in my body, and all around me are people in their private swimming pools, that I cannot enter. It's not true of course, I could get my visa card out and buy a CD player and start burning CDs at this internet cafe. But I feel that I have undergone this deprivation and misery for so long, that if I buy a CD player now I will feel even more angry that I didn't buy one earlier.

3) The Police. So far, I have no first hand experience of this, but I have heard so many stories. It's quite hard for me I think, with my 'If you want to know the time ask a policeman' mentality to grasp the concept that the police here are not to be trusted. The latest story I heard last night, it's actually quite amusing.

There are several tourist places in Guatemala where nice young men will approach you with a knife or gun, and kindly offer to relieve you of your money. Most of the time you just hand it over and you get away without anything too horrific. Anyway, some people were walking down the volcano in Antigua, and this happened. One of the women in the group punched the robber on the nose and ran away. She went straight away to the police station, and lo and behold, there was a policeman nursing a freshly broken nose.

3) The noise Clearly I'm getting old, but Xela is the noisiest city I have ever lived in. Leaning on your car horn whilst driving along the streets is common practice, as is having your car alarm go off and doing nothing about it. Other cars have rudimentary PA systems stuck on their roofs and drive round the streets advertising Gallo beer (it's crap). I'm fed up of people shouting at me to buy things or give them money just because I'm a westerner (see 4).

4) Being a Westerner. I'm not entitled to complain about this, being as I chose to come here. But I'm going to anyway.

Being a Western woman means that I'm fair game for sexist comments (often delivered in gangsa rapper style American English, which annoys me even more because a) I am not american. Just because I'm white, I'm not bloody american, I could be French or German or anything and b) I speak Spanish. If you're going to letch at me, do it in Spanish!!!). The underlying assumption is that Western women are whores. This notion is perpetuated by all the advertising and media here. If there's a picture of a woman in her underwear, or looking in any way seductive, it's a western woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. It's crazy! There are no Guatemalans that look like this.

5) Cup of tea. I realise I'm getting petty now, but why oh why does no-one here know how to make a cup of tea? The number of times I have sat in a cafe, staring gloomily into a cup of boiled milk with a tea bag on the saucer!