At home in Buenos Aires (by Laura)

We had heard great things about Buenos Aires before arriving here, with people talking up its great atmosphere, fantastic restaurants and cosmopolitan style.

After three and a half months of staying in no one place for more than 2 or 3 days, we were mostly looking forward to hanging up clothes, being normal people again and having our own front door (not to mention the promise of English language cable TV).

Once we had picked up the keys to our apartment in trendy suburb Palermo and filled our fridge with all sorts of foody luxuries, we began to really feel at home.

Buenos Aires (so called after the ´Buen Ayre´ or good air, that used to bring sailors from across the seas) is a city of leafy streets, Parisian-style cafés (right) and high-rise, balconied apartment blocks. The streets are shaded and cool and there are fantastic colonial windows and doorways to be admired on every corner. In the evenings, as with many European cities, the shops stay open late and people hang around having coffees until well after sundown.

It is a city made for eating out, but there are also fabulous food markets (left) as well as little fresh pasta shops, selling takeaway sauces and homemade dishes at bargain prices.

So we developed a very comforting pattern for a week: Spanish school, shopping and gallery-hopping, then pasta, wine and a good film at home in the evenings. Such homebodies have we been, that you would never have guessed we were in a city that only starts to emerge of an evening at around 11pm. To be honest, we were tucked up in front of Friends with a mug of hot chocolate by that point.

Happily, we can come back and do it all properly when we fly out of here in a couple of months time.

Laura