Not one to beat around the bush, or mince my words, or make a big song and dance, I fucking hate mosquitoes. I really do. I hate the way they buzz, that sort of high pitched ‘wheeee’ noise they make as they flit past your ear. I hate the way their bodies swell up when they’re full of my precious, life-giving blood, which clearly tastes like a Malbec the way they all seem to enjoy it so much. I hate the way you don’t know they’re there until you suddenly realise you just can’t stop scratching that weird place in between your big toe and your second and then you realise GODAMMIT THE BASTARDS GOT ME AGAIN.

I hate the way mosquito repellent doesn’t bloody work. I spend all day smelling like I’ve taken a bath in Dettol ‘with a touch of eucalyptus’ and still get at least five bites. I’ve even been bitten on my neck by the vampiric parasites.

I hate the way in summer you can’t have the window open with the light on. So, it’s either living in darkness or death by blood-sucking parasite. And they still come in even when the lights off anyway. And they bring their friends. Almost as if the surface of my skin has ‘tenedor libre’ written all over it.

I hate the way people try to kill them by clapping their hands in the air. You look ridiculous and completely malcoordinated, as if trying to keep time with the crazy rhythmn in your head to that song you can’t remember by Manu Chao. And it never actually works.

I don’t care about loving all creatures great and small. I don’t care about their place in the evolutionary stakes. I don’t care about anything to do with them. People get squeamish about cockroaches, but quite frankly cockroaches don’t bite, and they would survive an atomic bomb which at least makes them a bit cool – mind, mosquitoes probably would too, come to think of it, but then at least all the living, blood pumping, animals would be dead and the poor little buzzy flying leeches would starve to death.

On which note, if you are lucky enough not to suffer from ‘tasty blood syndrome’, then don’t rub it in. Commenting on how ‘mosquitoes don’t really bite me’ when confronted by someone who would gladly take a potato peeler to their outer layer of skin just to stop the itching is a bit like eating a choripan in front a malnourished orphan.

Tell you what I love, though. I love electric fly swatters.

Honestly. What is it with Chinese supermarkets in Argentina? Why is it that every time that I purchase something at one of these places the cashier gives back to me some wrinkled notes and one sweet in return.

At first I was stupid enough to think, ‘oh how nice, courtesy for my shop’, but eventually I realised that Chinese supermarkets are using sweets to replace coins.

I don’t quite get the whole lack of change/coins paranoia, and to be honest with you I find it quite irritating as well. The monedas rule the country, you could have all the money in the world, but without them you can’t even get as far as your own corner, as buses don’t accept anything but the little round metal nightmares and everyone is familiar with the angry looking vendors hanging big signs on their register threatening the buyers to pay with cambio, and if presented with a note would just roll their eyes: for crying at loud child, there’s no change here! This is a shop, what did you expect???

But what stuns me the most is not the day to day battle to get around the city trying to break a hundred.

What strikes me is that Chinese supermarkets have developed a parallel currency that can do the job as well as the peso. More importantly they are getting away with it.

Please don’t you, my beloved readers think that I’m bothered about this because of some unspeakable obsession with tax evasion. Truth to be told I’ve never been big on numbers, money… and much less taxes. I’ve never been able to deal with maths and any abstract concept beyond my practical comprehension has made me cry during my school years.

It’s actually the unilateralidad of the ‘candy system’ that pisses me off. But I’m going to do justice, for me and everyone who’s been given this Monopoly money without even being asked. I’m only waiting for the guts to kick in and I’m going to walk into the market and do my groceries, leaving my wallet home, but carrying a big bag of lovely sweets.

I’ll keep you posted on if they take them…

Upon explaining the Argentine mobile phone system to a new arrival, I was reminded of a scene out of Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning of Life’…

Headmaster: All right, settle down, settle down. Now before I begin the lesson will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move your clothes down on to the lower peg immediately after lunch before you write your letter home, if you’re not getting your hair cut, unless you’ve got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another boy, in which case collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after you’ve had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your clothes down onto the lower peg for you. Now…

Wymer: Sir?

Headmaster: Yes, Wymer?

Wymer: My younger brother’s going out with Dibble this weekend, sir, but I’m not having my hair cut today sir, so do I move my clothes down or…

Headmaster: I do wish you’d listen, Wymer, it’s perfectly simple. If you’re not getting your hair cut, you don’t have to move your brother’s clothes down to the lower peg, you simply collect his note before lunch after you’ve done your scripture prep when you’ve written your letter home before rest, move your own clothes on to the lower peg, greet the visitors, and report to Mr Viney that you’ve had your chit signed. Now, sex…

The Argentine phone system is pretty much as complex as the clothes-peg system in the aforementioned scene. When to start with 11, when to start with 15, when to dial both, and don’t forget to add that 9 if calling from abroad.

To break it down: If texting add 011 to any numbers starting with 15, if calling from a locutorio replace the 11 with 15. But don’t phone me from a locutorio, or I’ll be charged too! Best phone me from a landline. Oh, you can’t. Your landline won’t call mobiles. Ah. Well call me from a locutorio then, but make it snappy. Or best still text me, just remember to add that 011. And accept that the message may not arrive. Or may arrive in three weeks time, only to lead to text message confusion and crossed wires, as I think you’re asking me out again when in fact we broke up a week last Saturday.

Add the language barrier and we could be in for some real fun!

So, conclusion. Text messages: bad. Phone system: confusing. Perhaps we should all go back to writing letters to one another as a form of communication, or even talking face to face, just like the good old days.

A friend told me recently that in the US there is a healthy eating campaign in which the government is encouraging people to eat as much colour as possible, as colours generally mean fresh fruit and vegetables full of vitamins and minerals.

With this in mind I laugh ruefully at the food presented to me on a plastic tray on my 23-hour bus ride to Patagonia. It probably would be funnier were this not my third ‘beige’ meal in under 24 hours. Dinner the night before had been a cold milanesa with rice, a bread roll, crackers and a cake. Okay, so maybe not strictly beige, but distinctly lacking in colours nonetheless. Breakfast: more crackers, sweetened coffee with powdered milk, a strange almost-alfajor and dulce de leche. Again, variations on brown to white, definitely passing through beige along the way.

Now lunch: a bread roll, two slices of white bread with some re-constituted watery ham (pink – colours at last!) and tasteless cheese (so many cows, such little cheese with flavour…), more crackers and a cake.

Anyone on the Atkins diet should be advised against riding with Andesmar. (Although they did have on-board bingo which almost made up for the less-than-nutritious dinner.) It really was carbohydrate-tastic, as meals go, and very stodgy and tasteless.

Then I got to thinking about your average Argentine staples: medialunas, tostados, empanadas, bread, pasta, pizza, milanesa, tortilla… Even meat almost fits into the beige-brown spectrum. Vegetables are not big.

You go for a drink in a bar and get peanuts, palitos (strange straw-like snack things) or crisps. You go for a meal and a loaf of bread is presented to you as you order, generally with some sort of dip. A coffee is accompanied by biscuits or a small portion of cake. And I wonder why my waistline is bulging. It is hard to eat healthily in Argentina. And expensive. The price of vegetables is going through the roof.

But besides the cost advantages, the main problem is that ‘beige’ tastes good. Medialunas are amazing on a hangover – and even the fact that the two kinds are grease (grasa) and lard (manteca) does not put me off ordering them. The pizza is great and that’s without even starting on empanadas…

I just need to exercise a little more self-discipline. Or exercise a little more. And take less long-distance bus journeys.

A friend was recently moving house and, as he was carrying boxes out late at night on a weekend, his old apartment door slammed behind him, locking him out. He had nothing on him – only the keys to his new place.

Bit of a rubbish situation to be in, I hear you say. Yes, but it was made even worse when he realised he could neither get back into his apartment, nor leave the building: without keys you can’t get in or out. He ended up having to spend the night in the foyer, waiting for a neighbour to return.

Now, the locking-out element could happen anywhere – Buenos Aires can’t be blamed for stupidity – but the fact that you can be stuck between two doors, an apartment door and the main entrance of a building, seems ridiculous to me (not to mention unique to Argentina – or at least from my experience).

Is it for security? I can understand the urge to lock people out – thieves and general ruffians – but locking people in?

And it certainly makes storming out after an argument a bit less dramatic if you then have to go back or buzz up and ask to be let out. The blazing trail will disappear pronto.

If you need to make a hasty exit from a place what happens? Seriously – what about fire safety regulations?

In the post-Cromañon days where everyone is allegedly safety-conscious, and fire regulations have gone to the extreme in bars and nightclubs (you can be kicked out of a bar for dancing in a place with no licence, something I have yet to get my head around: how is dancing more likely to make you self-combust than standing still? But that’s for another column), it seems baffling to me that you can get physically stuck in buildings, between front doors and building entrances.

If a fire is raging inside your place, the last thing you’re thinking is going to be ‘oooh, it’s really hot in here, but where did I put my keys?’ And taking this to the absolute extreme, what if you need to escape a person? Your average BA apartment block would make the perfect setting for a low-budget slasher film, with the heroine being stalked around empty corridors.

It’s not necessarily all bad, though – the inability to leave is one way to ensure that hottie you brought home will still be there when you wake up. Even if it’s not through choice…