The feat of navigating the streets of Buenos Aires is not overly taxing. The city’s very regular grid system – although vast – proves utterly manageable, once armed with a trusty ‘Guia-T’ and some sense of where you are and where you are headed. Rather, the enigma of BA’s plethora of 2,159 calles, avenidas, pasajes and autopistas surrounds their names, origins, stories and peculiarities.

The scene is one of celebratory chaos. We surge forward: a barrage of velocipede force, flooding the wide avenues of downtown Buenos Aires to a rampageous soundtrack of whistles, horns, bells and cheers. As the city traffic builds up behind us, so do the triumphant chants of “¡Bici sí, auto no!” The torrent of elaborately decorated bicycles floods the capital, determined to take charge of the roads, en masse.

No se qué is a phrase in English probably translated best as je ne sais quoi. It’s also the phrase most used to describe Buenos Aires’ quirky collection of cafes and bars. So distinctive is the atmosphere of porteño bars that we cannot even describe them in our native tongue. There seems to be something about Café Tortoni, El Federal, Cafe Margot and the like which just leaves visitors to the Argentine capital speechless. These are the 54 Buenos Aires bars which have been enshrined by the government as ‘bares notables’.

“When one writes with one’s hand, the writing becomes corporal, transformed into a material thing.” So reads one of the many poems painstakingly etched in blue lettering onto the façades of the Boquense buildings lining Garibaldi and Olavarria streets. It is precisely what sculptor Américo Gadben had in mind nine years ago when he conceived the idea for inscribing 1000 metres of poetry onto Buenos Aires: to give life to words by injecting them with “the energy of the street”.

Markets in Buenos Aires, both Capital Federal and the surrounding suburbs, are varied and full of life. From antiques and artisanal produce, to gaucho shows and fruit and veg, Buenos Aires is certainly a city that holds the idea of the market in high esteem. An interested eye can plan a number of weekend trips to take in the various different atmospheres of each market in turn without ever seeming to run out of places to visit.

¡Viva Wikimanía! proclaims the slogan for Wikimania 2009, the annual conference for WIkipedia contributors. The fifth event was hosted in Buenos Aires at the end of August, when hundreds of people descended on the Argentine capital from all over the world.

Earlier this month, former Argentine President Carlos Menem and six other members of his administration were indicted and put under arrest for obstructing the investigation of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Aid Society. Accused of covering up evidence and protecting a key suspect, the indictment is a relief to the large Jewish Argentine community who awaits closure on the case.

Boedo is on the cusp of being cool. A crop of new cafes and stores celebrating the arts have recently emerged as fixtures along the avenue for which the barrio is named. However, while the press has begun to take note, the tourist population still remains largely ignorant of these new ventures inside and around this area defined by avenidas Independencia and San Juan, around the 4000 mark.

We humans make laws. There are more of them in existence now than at any other point in history. And more often than not, the odd, archaic or dumb ones are easier to leave on the ledgers than to bother voting away. They sprinkle the law books of the world for no apparent reason other than to serve as punch lines for schmoozing lawyers.

“In whatever part of the world I find myself, when I sense the smell of eucalyptus, I am in Adrogue. Adrogue was just that: a large quiet labyrinth of tree-lined streets, of gates and country houses; a labyrinth of vast peaceful nights that my parents liked to past through.”