Argentina

Buenos Aires hit me differently from the moment I walked out of the airport. The city has this weight to it — wide avenues, enormous skies, everything slightly oversized, like the whole place was built by people who refused to think small. I spent most of my days just walking, turning corners to find a new mural, a cemetery that looked like a city of marble, a stadium painted the colours of a hornet.

Recoleta was the thing I kept coming back to in my head. You walk through these narrow lanes between mausoleums and the scale of the craftsmanship is genuinely hard to process — angels carved from white stone, stained glass behind iron doors, the whole place silent under a hard blue sky. It felt less like a cemetery and more like a neighbourhood that had simply gone very quiet. La Boca was the opposite — every wall screaming colour, Maradona's face the size of a bus, football trophies behind glass like religious relics.

The food I remember most is a late asado — the cast-iron grill arriving at the table still smoking, a bottle of Malbec already open, the painted Buenos Aires sign on the wall behind us. Argentina moves slowly around a meal and I was fine with that. By the time we left I had forgotten what a quick lunch felt like.