My cigarette pack looks different. On packs sold in Britain, I’m used to seeing the Marlboro sign nearly obscured by an enormous warning label telling me that ‘Smoking kills’. In Argentina, however, there is no such label. Just a small unremarkable note on the side of the box that says, in Spanish, ‘Smoking is harmful to your health’, and in even smaller writing ‘Only for Adults’.

Just a couple of months ago, I found myself in a Recoleta café interviewing Argentina’s number one male model-turned-actor, Iván de Pineda. It was that very week I stumbled across a story by BBC’s Daniel Schweimler, entitled ‘Argentina: Ugly people strike back’.

6th July 2006 was a normal winter day in Buenos Aires. At around 5pm, 27-year-old Martín Rios hopped off the number 80 bus in the capital’s northern neighbourhood of Belgrano, and suddenly opened fire on random passersby. He injured six people and killed one – a bright, 19-year-old student named Alfredo Marcenac.

Walk into the BAUEN Hotel and you won’t be overwhelmed by the luxury of the lobby. You will more likely feel like you a stuck in a 1970s time-warp, and possibly wonder how such an out-dated hotel is still in business.

Beyond the Bombonera, in the heart of La Boca, lives Eloisa Cartonera. A whirlwind of colour and cardboard, she is not a person, but the headquarters of a tiny book publishing outfit – ‘the most colourful editorial in the world’.

e’ve all had somebody tell us how much better we look when we get back from holiday. But many people are returning quite literally ‘changed’ from their holiday in Argentina. With a growing reputation for having world-class surgeons performing plastic surgery at rock bottom prices, Argentina is high up on the list of ‘medical tourism’ hot spots.

When Silvia Casas, a volunteer at the Red Cross, cradled in her arms a three-week-old baby abandoned by his mother, she first noticed the blood under his fingernails and his damaged knuckles. A paediatrician confirmed that the wounds were from having continually scratched and thumped at the boards of his cot, having been left alone for prolonged periods of time by his biological parents.

Anyone who has ever been to Buenos Aires will have noticed that as the shops start to close up and the city begins to wind down for the evening, a whole section of society comes to life. As regular office workers go home, some 6,000 people’s job is just beginning.

On 30th December 2004, a popular band called Callejeros was playing in República Cromañón – a nightclub in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Once. The place was packed with fans, but at 10.45pm, before the band had even finished their first song, a fire broke out, cutting the power.

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts. Or at least that’s what Víctor Piris says as he defends his team’s final position of 42 out of 48 in this year’s Homeless World Cup in Cape Town. nd the taking part does seem to have counted – as both Piris, 34, and Adrián Camacho, 36, can testify. Both are vendors of Hecho en Bs As (HBA), the street publication sold by homeless people around Argentina’s capital, and had never travelled overseas before.