Simon and Rach in Latin America: Buenos Aires

We spent nine days in Buenos Aires including two weekends. We left as full of enthusiasm for the city as when we arrived, but we were ready to sleep for days and addicted to strong late morning coffees after so many late nights.

The Casa Rosada or Pink House is the presidential palace.

The main pedestrianised shopping street. Harrods has closed.

Beautiful old shopping centres or 'galerias' lead off the main shopping streets.

At first glance, there are similarities between Buenos Aires and London.

Congress building

It's a big, bustling city with lots of historic buildings in the centre, mixed with new glass office tower blocks.

There are trendy warehouse conversions along the river and lots of big central parks.

Apartments in converted silos in Palermo.

One of several enormous trees in Buenos Aires, which has large girders supporting its sprawling branches.

Another great tree

Feral cats are fed by a cat lover in the Botanical Gardens. There are hundreds of them everywhere in the park.

There are different parts of the city with their own thing going on.

Recoleta, a central district with parks, galleries, a famous cemetery and a Saturday market.

There's San Telmo, with an antiques market and shops, cobbled streets, a busy bar and cafe scene and trendy boutiques;

there's Palermo, full of restaurants, bars and clubs and designer boutiques; there's La Boca, an eastend working class port district that's cashed in on its colourful past and houses and history of football and tango to be a big tourist pull on just a few of its streets.

This is where the similarities end. Buenos Aires is operating on a completely different time scale to anywhere else we have been. It is not just the young trendsetters who stay out until 6 in the morning, but also tango enthusiast men and women in their 70s who dance the night away in tango clubs. Restaurants are deserted at 8pm but there are queues out of the doors at 11pm and a full house eating at 1am. We stayed in Belgrano, an upmarket, well-established apartment district. There are flower stalls on every other corner; great coffee shops with coffee croissant combinations for £1.50 all over the place; squares with street markets at the weekends; fantastic ice-cream parlours; greengrocers with perfect stacks of peppers, aubergines, satsumas and apples bustling with customers; far too many of the same supermarket chain using far too many plastic bags; as well as launderettes, hairdressers, clothes shops, cinemas and restaurants.

There is an obsession with dogs in Buenos Aires and little inclination to use poop-a-scoops. Dog poo is everywhere, if you drop your guard for just a moment, you've trodden in it, as Simon did several times. Many a hair-dryered poodle is paraded around on a weekend and during the week, dog walkers tear around the parks with anything from 10 to 25 pampered pooches. Many people live in apartments, own dogs and work full-time. Their solution is to pay dog walkers to take their dogs out every day for up to 6 hours. Unbelievable.

Musically there's a bit of everything going on in Buenos Aires. There's certainly a huge house music scene with a raft of super-clubs and big name djs, but it's just as easy to find a good night playing rock, jazz, British indie, techno, drum and bass, contemporary tango or cheesy pop. We went to a Brazilian drumming night in a converted warehouse cultural centre on a Monday evening.

We danced from 7-10pm with a young, mixed crowd of around 1000 people.

We also went to two tango nights, one in a traditional hall and one in a converted wooden cathedral. We arrived home from our final night out of the week at 6am, having left behind streets still packed with people and queues outside clubs which we may well have gone in ourselves had we not had to pay!