Buenos Aires - More Old World Than The Old World Itself

When you land in Buenos Aires after a 14-hour flight mentally braced for the proverbial Latin American deal, you are in for a quite bizarre, alternative universe kind of experience. You find yourself in Mediterranean Europe but with a twist. As it goes, your brain first picks the familiar and only a little while later the differences start dawning on you.

Laid back but efficient, Buenos Aires is a snazzy if a little faded mix of Barcelona and Milan with a princely dollop of Paris. There is no shortage of space in the New World, so the city is laid out generously. Its central thoroughfare, the 24-lane Avenida de Nove Julio is world's widest street and the enormous Teatro Colón that takes up a whole block is world's largest, seating a whopping two and half thousand.

Founded as early as in 1536 - just four decades after America was discovered - Buenos Aires has ever since been cultivated as a piece of the Old Country transplanted over the Atlantic. Every European architectural trend can be found here: Baroque and Neo-Classical cathedrals, Spanish colonial mansions, grand Art Nouveau buildings, Art Deco high-rises and a few obligatory Corbusier-influenced monstrosities. Until WWI Argentina was world's third richest country, and the opulence of those days is imprinted of its capital's grand architecture.

The wish to be as European as can be even led to some excesses when indigenous flora was mercilessly weeded out to give way to chestnut and poplar trees painstakingly imported across the ocean. Luckily, the city fathers came to their senses and lush jacarandas, ombús and eucalipti give the grand boulevards and resplendent plazas of this fast and glamorous metropolis the exotic look that, considered the location, it deserves.

Porteños may speak Spanish but it is mostly Italian blood that pumps through their veins. Brisk and lucid, the local Rioplatense dialect sounds a delightful Italian staccato. Even McDonald's joints here have café sections where tiny cups of powerful aromatic espresso are served with fine cakes. But never is the indulgently hedonistic Mediterranean heritage more evident than every day at about 9 PM when the city comes abuzz with smartly dressed urbanites pouring out into the streets looking to quench their appetite for steak and wine, never-failingly superb here. Coincidentally, it is the same crowd that employs world's second largest army of shrinks (after New York) and plastic surgeons (after LA).

There is something nostalgic about this city, a poignant flavour of half-forgotten dreams of an era gone by. Unscathed by both world wars and largely untouched by the excesses of post-modernity, Buenos Aires is what Southern Europe might have become without the Marshall Plan and EU directives. Its Subte - the underground system adorned with colourful Art Deco panneaux - is world's cheapest time machine . Two pesos deliver you straight into the Roaring 20s. The creaking carriages with the interior of leather handles, vintage mirrors and polished wood are the same that took around Cortazar and Borges around the oldest metro in Latin America, the Southern Hemisphere and, for that matter, the entire Spanish-speaking world. Sadly, they are being slowly but surely phased out by fast and cushy but faceless Japanese-made trains.

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