It's another world when you cross the Andes from Chile to Argentina. As your plane descends from the bumpy ride over the mountains, you see a country spread out below you that's vastly different from Chile's rugged Pacific flora. Here, the dense greenery below has an almost tropical look to it; Florida, not California. When you emerge from the plane a short time later, you can feel it: the heavy humidity that makes Santiago's dry heat sound refreshing.

Arriving in Buenos Aires from Santiago is a shock at first. There is trash strewn throughout the streets and mounded in astonishing peaks at intersections. Buildings are crumbling and peeling. Electrical wires, incredibly, hang in heavy clusters from the tops of high-rises and wind their way down the outside of buildings and through windows into apartments or offices. Perhaps things were different before the economic crisis brought this richest Latin American country to its knees; I don't know.

But then your eyes adjust to the comparative untidiness of the city - and you enter the neater, richer districts - and you begin to notice the loveliness of the city's 19th Century buildings. Unlike Santiago, most of the city's architecture is older - little seems to have been destroyed. Somewhere near downtown, an incredible cupola remains, nestled surprisingly comfortably into a modern glass edifice. The kind of building that perhaps should be condemned for whatever it's destroyed but instead makes me look twice for what it's preserved, and how elegantly.

It's a big, big city, with good food, bustling restaurants, busy neighborhood cafes, and overflowing nightclubs. It's fun. It's exciting. The shopping is good. The people are euphorically talkative and friendly, drawing more willing Spanish from a foreigner than a year and a half with the more reserved Chilenos, despite the wildly different Argentinian argot and accent. Despite its cosmopolitan image and sophisticated nightlife, it's a casual, unpretentious city. When it's desperately hot, men walk the streets without shirts. Children run around in bathing suits. Along the Costanera, a wide pedestrian walkway that runs next to a dry riverbed, families sunbathe on recliners or eat choripan (chorizo in a roll) and drink beer from plastic cups at little stands blaring music and belching barbecue smoke.

The tap water made me sick and the ATMs weren't working when we needed them most, but those are just the things that make you appreciate going home to Santiago. I still can't wait for my next trip to the so-called "Paris of the Americas" - which, in reality, is not Parisian at all; not Chilean; just a city all its own.