“I was 25 the first time I went.” says Esteban. “I didn’t want to have sex while my parents were at home, so I went to a telo with my girlfriend. It was fun, a good experience!” Albergues transitorios or ‘telos’ as they are more commonly known, are a type of hotel where a person pays by the hour instead of the whole night. They are used by couples as a place to go to spend ‘intimate’ time together in a discreet and private manner. In other words, they have beds – but not much sleeping gets done.

Buenos Aires is a place renowned for its bustling nightlife with lots of bars, clubs and venues dotted all over the city. Palermo is a neighbourhood where you can find something to suit all tastes including Club Aroaz, as you search for your own particular buena onda.

The technical definition of a flash mob is where a large crowd of people assemble in a public place and simultaneously take part in an unusual activity either individually or as a group, and then quickly disperse. Participants are kept informed on planned events via social networking sites, including Facebook, Myspace, Wikipedia, private blogs, public forums and personal websites.

I entered the church late: mass already underway, the choir already crooning an unknown vesper and the priest heading to the pulpit. This, however, wasn’t your typical religious service as, rather than a traditional Catholic church as one would expect in Argentina, this was the church of Argentine football legend Diego Maradona.

If you think that Peruvian and Japanese cuisine are nothing like one another, well little do you know. Apparently this combination is huge all over the world and Buenos Aires couldn’t be any less.

“There is no other place like this on earth” said Judas Iscariot, chatting to me intermittently between gurgling communications on his walkie talkie. This, however, was not Judas the disciple everybody loves to hate, but merely a park official masquerading as him.

The first thing I noticed as I approached the bar was the beautiful stained glassed windows with the name ‘la Vaca Profana’ written so elegantly across. ‘The Profane Cow’: such an intriguing name. It seemed to have a quiet charm, and upon entering, I wasn’t disappointed.

‘No Avestruz’ (No Ostrich) refers to the lanky creature’s rumoured habit of burying his head in the sand when the pressures of his ostrich life become too much to endure. In the otherworldly cultural space that bears this title, such behaviour is just about the only thing that is strictly forbidden.

At first I was sceptical. A 17-year-old girl was on the cover of Perfíl for having posted pictures of herself online each day for the past two years. That’s it. Mind you, these are not pictures of her camping in the Antarctic or doing extreme sports in an armadillo costume. These are pictures of her doing absolutely nothing.

Just as the Lord warned Adam not to eat the apple, my father warned me to stay away from seedy bars in Argentina. I was reminded of his words within seconds of setting foot outside my Barrio Norte apartment and discovering Argentina’s one and only swingers bar four doors down