Matt swapped his native England for Argentina in 2002 while chasing Gabriela, an implausibly gorgeous Argentinian whom he married the following year. He has lived and worked (but mainly lived) in Buenos Aires ever since. Having no obvious trade or skills but being quite good at spelling, Matt became a freelance writer. Over the past few years, Matt has written or edited books and articles for a variety of publishers, including Time Out, Wallpaper* and the British Automobile Association. In his spare time Matt translates film scripts, organises charity pub quizzes, consolidates his position as the number one Angry Birds player in the BsAs metropolitan area, and translates traditional nursery rhymes into Spanglish for his daughter Millie. (Her favourite is ‘Pop goes the Weasel’ or ‘Explota la Comadreja’.)
A traditional Argentine Sunday lunch is a two-course affair. The first course consists of white bread, sausages, chimichurri, black pudding, grilled cheese, chitterlings, sweetbreads, ribs, various steak cuts, potato salad and, if anyone has room for it, some dressed lettuce. The second course is fruit salad. Unless you’re a vegetarian or recovering from bariatric surgery, this is one of the world’s great meals.
We take a look at Argentina’s runners and riders (and fencers and hockey players and judoists…) for the London 2012 Olympic Games. In a measure of just how low-key Argentina’s Olympics build-up has been, it took a slick piece of political agitprop to get locals talking about the Games, due to start in London on July 27…
Wines are like X-Factor contestants: the crummy ones are sometimes more popular than the good ones, and at the end of a Saturday night, you may feel like you’ve had too much of them. However, it’s trickier to judge a wine than it is to judge a singer. While anyone can hurl jibes at a television screen, it takes a certain level of nerve and know-how to summon the sommelier to one’s table and tell them that the single-vineyard Malbec they recommended…
Don’t worry if you didn’t catch Argentina’s opening match against England in the Rugby World Cup on 10 September. It was as poor a game as you could ever hope to miss. England scraped through 13–9 in the end, but looked less like the world-class side they are and more like 15 blokes who had…
Unlike 1983 (the cathartic first free elections after seven years of military rule), 2003 (the return to some kind of normality after the economic emergencies of 2001/2) and 2007 (the swearing-in of Argentina’s first elected woman president), 2011 isn’t shaping up to be a “transformational” election. Rather, 23 October 2011 will be a day when voters wrestle with one of the oldest and most straightforward dilemmas in electoral politics: namely, do we want more of the same, or shall we give someone else a whirl?
Dead. Cold. Boring. Closed. Non-existent. These are among the politer adjectives a fashionable Argentine will deploy if you ask her to describe the Uruguayan coastal resort of Punta del Este in the low season. We don’t agree with this assessment. In fact, there are a number of good reasons why visiting Punta out of season isn’t the world’s goofiest plan.
Question: how did Argentinian wine, so recently the object of pitying amusement from wine buffs, become profitable, fashionable and, more to the point, drinkable? Matt Chesterton talks to Ian Mount to find out.
Where do you go when you want to see some of Argentina’s lesser-spotted tourist areas and places of interest? Matt Chesterton channels Sir Ben Kingsley and hits the road to find out.
The world-famous glaciers of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, in the province of Santa Cruz, have finally got the visitor’s centre they deserve: the Glaciarium, aka the Museum of Ice.
Christmas in Argentina, as those with even the most rudimentary grasp of geography will know, occurs at the height of summer. With that in mind, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the locals in this part of the world have sensibly revamped their yuletide festivities to take account of the hot weather. Assume again.