La Vida Aventurera: Mar del Plata

Back in June, Maria and I set out to choose our trips, where we would go and when. We scheduled Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires' #1 beach town, in early October, supposedly when the weather was getting nice and just before finals started. As usual, the universe laughed at us. Spring in Buenos Aires is rainy and windy. And exams started the week before we went on our long-awaited beach weekend. We were both dying for it, too. We'd missed our whole summer at home; we'd had to see pictures and statuses from friends who had vacationed at the beach; we'd seen their tans and been filled with envy. But now it was our turn, right?!

Wrong.

Here's what Mar del Plata looked like the entire weekend that we were there:

But, guess what? We didn't care. We rolled with it, as we have become so adept at doing. Luckily, we had gotten a private twin room in the hostel/hotel we were staying in, and even more luckily, that room had a TV. Instead of lazing around on the beach all weekend as planned, we lazed around indoors. I believe this captures the essence of the weekend:

We did leave the hotel plenty: we went out to eat, we shopped in the Guemes area of Mar del Plata (where we both splurged a little on some nice and highly-discounted clothing items), we went out to the Monumento a San Salvador and saw more sea lions, and we went to the Museo del Mar. The weekend wasn't our typical high-speed, exploratory adventure. It was more an escape. With a week or so of finals over and two or three more weeks to go, we needed to get away and just relax. And that's exactly what we did. Movies, ice cream, Malbec, seafood, shopping, and mate. Mar del Plata.