Mar Del Plata

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A weekend at the Beach

Last weekend was a much needed break from literally a week of solid pouring rain. It rained so hard that in my 40 min walk home from work the seams of my umbrella began to split under the pressure!!! Buenos Aires had ridiculous floods causing them to hold a rope and wade through 3 and a half feet of water at the corners! Obviously they have drainage system issues here and the government again promised to fix them with an underground piping system.. But of course this promise was made last year as well....

So in order to escape my FSD group travelled 5 and a half hours south to Mar del Plata, a huge beach resort town. Turns out that when classes start in March all of the Jubilados (Retired) go on vacation so the beaches were filled with older couples. The first day it kept raining. We stayed the first night at a campsite a bit away from downtown. It was desolate since this wasn’t the season for the younger visitors and so we grabbed lunch in town played air hockey and video games all day and went shopping.. We finally made it back to our campsite armed with pizza and lots of wine. We chatted and listened to music as we relaxed and listed to the rain all night long.

Luckily we woke up to sunlight!!! After 9 straight days of pouring down rain it stopped! Out came the beautiful rainbows and the amazing sun! We made our way into the city to our new hotel but first stopped at the shipyard where all of the wild sea lions hang out. We attempted to pet them and ran away screaming when we got sneezed on by these large very smelly animals. Once at the hotel we all changed and ran down to the beach. Claimed our spots and jumped in the FREEZING cold water. I only managed to go in after hours of sunbathing and walking along the beach left me sweating and dying for relief. After we had all successfully been burnt and were fed up with being hit on by ugly lifeguards trying to speak broken English we went back to the hotel for showers and siestas. We had a mini workshop in the hotel and then headed out for a 9pm dinner. I got this amazing steak thing which I initially promised to share until realized I was hungrier than I thought and ate the entire thing. Then we made our way to Alem… a street like Adams Morgan renowned for its bars. We started off with a pool hall because no one goes out to bars before midnight.. played a few games and of course argued rules. Believe it or not I actually turned out to be right every time! Then we made it out to bars for Happy Hour specials.. still early for Argentines… I think it ran until 2.. then with a killer headache I made my retreat to the hotel.

On Sunday we made it over to the Aquarium. I can’t remember the last time I went to one but it was so much fun. We saw sea-lion and dolphin shows, went to a 3-D movie and walked around taunting fish and crocodiles.. we even got to spend some more time on the beach which actually had more rocks than sand this time around. Arvil taught us all about different sea creatures, Jen became the photographer, Wendy posed, Marcela tried yoga, and Ana went hunting for “interesting” things.

It was a great little getaway but if you ever travel there word to the wise is leave yourself tons of time. Transportation around the city isn’t the best and it is really spread out.

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