City Tour...What is Mar del Plata?

Finally, I got a decent enough internet connection to post this video of some footage from our tour of Mar del Plata.




Well this video is made up of footage from the tour we took a few days ago in Mar del Plata (which much to Michelle's delight and for typing purposes I shall now refer to as solely "Mar").

Mar is a beach town, to put it bluntly. It was founded centuries ago and was nothing but a bunch of plantations until the ultra wealthy from Buenos Aires, started coming down during the summer months to celebrate the holidays and get a break from the humidity of the north.

By the 1930s there was a casino and a huge mansions on the water. The architecture style at that time was mostly English Tudor, or even of Swiss influence (there's a log cabin). Then the middle class groups started to build summer homes, and a real population started to settle by the 1950s. That's when the architecture influenced by the Italian Villa began to take hold. Today the city's population nearly triples in the winter season to about nine million people.

Today, the city itself is a lot more spread out than Buenos Aires, in my opinion. It's sprawling and hard to get to large distances because there's no subway system. Only buses and taxis (which from experiences on Constitición Ave, earlier this week are not terribly easy to get hold of).

While the main industry is tourism, Mar is also the largest port city in Argentina. The tour took us to the port, which was interesting. The water was gross, and the boats were kind of dilapidated...but there were smelly sea lions!

The sea lions migrate each year in the summer up to the port around here, and then migrate somewhere south to mate. They were cool to watch, but man did they smell. They were just chilling under a roof, with one security guard who would whistle if you approached. They made loud noises and fought with each other. I thought the stray dogs around here smelled, but I think that a population of those sea lions roaming the street would be much worse.

The nice part of the port, however, was this little rotund accordian player who serenaded us with a milonga. He was quite the ham:





Mar del Plata is really unlike anything in the United States. If I had to make a comparison, I'd say Miami on crack, with the laxness of the Jersey Shore and the coastline of Malibu.