With several new skate parks commissioned in recent years, the future of skateboarding in Argentina looks bright. For the low-down on where to go for some of the best boarding in the city, check out Michael Tanenbaum’s Top 5 Places to Skate in BA.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with the number 19, the maverick of buses.

Melanie Henderson speaks to US professional basketball players who have joined clubs in Argentina about learning Spanish, scary air travel, and being mistaken for Michael Jordan.

In Buenos Aires, running away to join the circus is no longer necessary. Megan Cassidy joins a beginner’s trapeze course at La Arena, a prestigious Argentine circus company teaching circus-skills to all on a casual hobby basis.

Having never played polo in his life, Lillo Montalto Monella heads to Puesto Viejo Estancia in search of a beginners’ polo experience that lives up to romantic tourist expectations whilst remaining authentically Argentine.

Please don’t take this as a mark of disrespect, my dear readers and fellow travellers through the smoke-obscured labyrinth that is

Hi-ho, Hi-ho | Back off to work goes the Guardia Imperial

Argentine football. It delights me to have the chance once more to regale you with my tales of following the mighty Racing Club across the length and breadth of this fair nation, sharing everything inside the stadiums that’s fit, and not so fit, to publish.

For myself, however, and as I imagine it would be for most enfermos who claim allegiance to the cream of Avellanedan football, my re-entry down the hallowed halls of the Argentina Independent is but the second most important reunion I have enjoyed this week. And anyone with a particularly long memory who remembers my earlier musings on the same subject, will surely by now know just what I am talking about.

That’s right. After two and a half long, agonising months away from the Cilindro, frantically scouring images of sports broadcasts transmitted from impossibly sunny beaches in Mar del Plata in search of just one more football fix to keep me in relative sanity, the Clausura Crucero General Belgrano is in action. And remaining blissfully unaware of the escalating tensions between my nation of birth and my adopted country which could well end with an atomic bomb dropping on my Caballito palace one day, I made my way with a skip in my step to my second home in Argentina.

The routine was reassuringly familiar, like emerging from a coma to find that the sky is still blue, the grass is still green and River Plate are still in the B. Sunday’s lack of traffic meant that myself, Omar and Juan arrived in Avellaneda some two hours before kick-off, leaving ample time to start the previa. For those unfamiliar with the football previa, I can only recommend it as a wonderful activity on a boiling Sunday afternoon. Ice-cold Quilmes? Check. The very best Milanesa sandwich in the whole of Buenos Aires? Check? Raucous singing amongst the faithful who were making up for 10 weeks of shopping and DIY on the weekends?  Oh you’d better believe it.

You see, even by the standards of the famously optimistic, some would say deluded, Racing support, hopes are sky-high for this season. Academia favourite Alfio ‘Coco’ Basile is back on the coach’s bench for a fifth spell with the club that made him a legend. The name may not ring a bell to casual observers, but the voice is unmistakeable. Coco has always been famous for a vocal register that could be used to scare birds away from crops, but after a recent throat operation he now sounds like part of his warm-up exercise consists of gargling gravel followed by a milkshake composed of live bees. Still, he’s an idol, and that combined with the ability of last year’s runners-up to maintain their squad intact meant that the faith was there, ideally to start with a win against relegation-threatened Tigre.

The great Basile deep in pre-season training

Of course, since this is Racing, we saw nothing of the sort. The most exciting part of proceedings was the entrance of the players, the most popular of whom were left beaming by the serenades of the home popular. Unfortunately, that was as good as it got. 90 turgid, uninspired minutes of football were what followed, although for those of us who had engaged enthusiastically in the previa this pain was mitigated by the Quilmes misting sense and sentience to a degree.

So we continued jumping and singing throughout the fixture, oblivious to the 0-0 that was as inevitable as the tides or an insufferable Boca fan following any victory. The draw was fair, mainly because neither team did nearly enough to win, and as we filed out of the stadium along with 40,000 fellow fans, hope of bouncing back with a victory in the following week dominated conversation. On Sunday it did not come, but of course the next 18 games should be a walk in the park.

In the interests of balance, and mainly to protect this blog from claims that it is a platform for the rantings of a one-eyed madman, there were some other games played over the weekend (my sources inform me). Boca of course won again, angering everyone in what we can contrarily dub the Mitad menos Uno who wish nothing but strife on this band of Maradona wannabes. Of course this wasn’t enough for the Bosteros, and as I finish these scribblings coach Julio Falcioni is one his way out due to a refusal to share his toys with the great Roman Riquelme.

So ends a predictably action-packed first week of the Argentine season, although admittedly the action was to be found more often off the pitch than on it. The coming weekend sees Racing making the long trip to Mendoza (the place with the wine) to meet Godoy Cruz, a punishing 24 hour round trip that surely only the most ridiculously obsessed fan would make. The bus leaves at midnight on Saturday, I’ll be the one banging the windows and cradling a bottle of Fernet. Vamo L’Acadeeeeeee

PS. A gratuitous plug for myself seems merited. An article of mine about Racing’s 1967 Intercontinental Cup triumph over Celtic, which made the team the first-ever Argentine world champions, will appear in issue four of the Blizzard magazine. Aside from my scribblings it is a fantastic read which brings together some of football’s best journalists from across the world, and it is available to pre-order on a pay as you like basis via http://www.theblizzard.co.uk/, hard copies and pdfs for those of you who have those fancy space-age reading machines both available.

Rory McClenaghan speaks to Federico Peretti, the man who travelled 50,000km around Argentina visiting lower-league football clubs for his new photo book and documentary, ‘El otro fútbol’.

The concept-based martial art of Wing Chung, has its roots in buddhist and taoist philosophies promising benefits beyond the purely physical. Laura Mowat checks out a beginners class in Buenos Aires’ SDS Institute.

At Hipódromo Argentino de Palermo, everything above ground might be precisely as you’d expect, but beneath the tracks lie a few surprises. Natasha Sá Osório enters the glaring, underground world of Argentina’s answer to Las Vegas.

Blanka Hay looks at how the Argentine Sumo Association is encouraging young and old to participate in sumo wrestling, a sport that was introduced to Argentina by a Japanese colony more than 80 years ago.