… in 1948, the novelist Lawrence Durrell wrote a letter to his friend Mary Hadkinson with some observations about Argentina:

You envy us? Argentina is a large flat melancholy and rather superb-looking country full of stale air, blue featureless sierra, and businessmen drinking Coca-Cola. One eats endless beef and is so bored one could scream. It is the most lazy-making climate I have ever struck: not as bad as Egypt, of course: but I’d give a lifetime of Argentina for three weeks of Greece.