This week officially marks one calendar month in Argentina – a marker which seems to have come around both impossibly fast and incredibly slowly. The night I left England feels like part of a different life. There I was, a white, nervous little girl sat with a backpack which still had all the labels, fidgeting nervously and pretending to read the news. Now I find myself tanned and “argentinified” sitting at a bar with my new friends cursing Kirchner. (I have to be honest, I am still not wholly sure of my opinions of the Argentine president but if you want to get anywhere here, you have to hate her.) I am now fully integrated into the marketing and publishing team for a local restaurant chain and accompanying newspaper. For anyone not aware, after a couple of weeks work with the stylish fashion magazine, I quietly packed my bags and left – I couldn’t pretend that I cared about the merits or otherwise of the Atkins diet and I would never have acceptable hair. Now I am working with an eclectic team of young people in what is a rather foreboding building in the city centre. There is Sebastian, the editor, a young dreamer who wants to change the world; Lore, the administrator, who exudes bubbliness and charisma. There is Mariana, the writer, who has a strange bob with long straggly bits hanging down apparently on purpose; Mariana 2, who somehow makes frizzy hair work (an ability I envy greatly), and Mauri, the camp design man and my fix-it when I have my daily argument with the computer. And then me, the Brit with the hair. Correction: the Brit with the fur ball on her head. Remarkably, this seems to have been a slot in need of filling, and never have I been made to feel so welcome.

Lovely though these people may be (and luckily for me, they really are lovely) looks in this country are a really big thing. If your boobs are small, you make them bigger. If your nose is crooked, you get it straightened. Plastic surgery is even given as 1st prize in night club dancing competitions, and large bill boards across the city show someone taking a knife to their not-unusually-large bum in a pro-surgery advertising campaign.

As such, people at work seem to see me and my hair problem as something of a curiosity. The fashion designer walked over one day and said, totally frankly “what is wrong with your hair?” as if frizz was an actual condition, and another regularly gives it a playful pat as she walks by. I have been told that there are chemical solutions to this otherwise terminal condition and, knowing this country, there are probably support groups too.

So it seems that Dove’s “real beauty” campaign, has not clung to the hearts and minds of this country. Like many of the oddities of this country: the way they treat their animals, their acceptance of drink driving, I am torn between wanted to launch a crusade, and quietly accepting it as a cultural difference. Who am I, a foreign teenager who has lived amongst them just one month, to tell Argentines how to life their lives? Change must surely come from within, but in the meantime? On Wednesday I begin work in a prison, a totally different experience which I may or may not be ready for. I am very curious to see how those people, people living on the other side of what is a very obvious rich-poor divide, see their sprawling country and its seemingly loco views. Do they reject the plastic surgery band wagon, or trail along longingly behind it. Most probably, it isnt the sort of thing I will ever get to find out, but I will let you know…