Gimme my Mate!

Yerba mate and hot water
in a mate with a bombilla
(picture from wikipedia)

So we've been to the land of beer, Santa Fe (NE), and more recently I did a whirlwind trip to San Juan (NW), which is known as the land of wine . . . but all over Argentina and even Uruguay is the land of Mate (pronounced MAH-tay)!! I have never seen a culture so addicted to? obsessed with? tea - it's incredible! No, we're not even talking "coca tea" or anything like that . . . mate is like a normal crushed tea leaf tea called 'yerba mate'. So, I can't figure out if the obsession is with the tea itself or the elaborate ritual of drinking it that involves a goard like receptacle, called a mate, a nickel-silver straw with a spoon-like strainer at the end, called a bombilla, a thermos full of hot water, and, of course, the mate leaves themselves. Oh, and I almost forgot that it is an incredibly social procedure which involves passing the mate around so that everyone can have a sip . . . yes drinking from the same straw. I kind of relate it to the kissing . . . an affectionate-physical-social-sharing kind of thing.

OK, about this process . . . I had a fantastic Spanish tutor for a few weeks named Veronica. Each time she came to the apartment for my lesson she would bring an interesting exercise for me to do. The first day, we started with a political cartoon. Then, she moved on to teach me how to write excuses via email, she taught me about "la fiaca" which I'll get into in another posting, and then we embarked on an ordering activity in which I was to read the steps of how to make mate and put them in order. Wow, I had  never considered that there were certain "steps" to drinking mate. No doubt I had seen mate drinkers passing the gourd at break time on the stoops of building entrances, in parks reading books and watching concerts, in guard stations monitoring surveillance cameras, in the audience of my workshops, in airports at the baggage claim, and Veronica told me she once saw a man riding a bicycle simultaneously sipping, steering, and holding the thermos under his arm. Even street people invest in modern thermoses to keep their water nice and hot. Where they get the hot water I'm not sure.

For you Spanish speakers, here's the activity Vero (Veronica) gave me:
Instrucciones para preparar mate
Ordená esta instrucciones:
a. agregar azúcar, cáscaras de limón o naranja u otras yerbas aromáticas
b. llenar 3/4 del mate con yerba
c. clalentar el agua peron no dejes que hierva
d. pensar "¡qué rico!/qué horrible!" y seguir tomando/no tomar nunca más en la vida
e. poner la bombilla
f. poner la pava* con agua en el fuego
g. tapar el mate con la mano y sacurdirlo para sacarle el polvo a la yerba
h. tirar el agua caliente cerca de la bombilla
i. tomar el mate hasta escuchar un ruiditio

1__   2__  3__  4__  5__  6__  7__  8__  9__

Suerte! Answers will be supplied soon!  Lastly, Vero also gave me a link to a video of a woman explaining specifically how she likes to prepare and drink mate. Such a ritual . . . Disfrutálo!

EL DISFRUTE - Consejos como preparar un buen mate por Karla Johan Lorenzo