Buenos Aires is a romantic, crumbling, decadent city where I feel at home yet totally lost. The black and yellow taxis and the architecture recall Barcelona, but the jet lag reminds me that I am in the southern hemisphere. It is April, and the beginning of autumn. My hotel looks Parisian, but a famous writer of tango lyrics lives here. I don't speak Spanish, but luckily there is an English newspaper called the Buenos Aires Herald. It informs me that president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has been meeting President Obama. Locals call her CFK, like a fast food restaurant. And, by the way, the steaks are from heaven.
The best bookshop in BA is called El Ateneo. Typically, it is not really a bookshop at all, but a former theatre – which also spent time as a cinema. The books sit like spectators below gilded balconies and a domed cupola with a fresco of falling angels. And as we're in the city of Borges, the revered writer of mysteries, it's apt that the place is a labyrinth: you could wander in here for hours. Why would you want to order books on Amazon when you can come to a place like this?
El Ateneo pleased me because it made me feel as though books – which risk being digitised to extinction – might survive. The secret is to make them feel precious. I've always thought that shops were media. And at El Ateneo, the medium is the message.
