"Mate" is more than beverage, it's a lifestyle. Seriously.
To give you a very basic rundown, mate (pronounced MAH-tay) is a hot drink, not unlike tea, which is created from the infusion of hot water and yerba in a hollow gourd that has been cured beforehand for this purpose. It seems to fall into the family of hot, caffeinated beverages with cult-status followings (e.g. coffee and tea).
What really sets mate apart from other drinks, besides the taste, is the social component; the mate is generally meant to be shared among a group of people--a bit like a peace pipe. The ritual has its own
rules of etiquette, the finer points of which still escape me although I do know the basics. Basically, one person will pour hot water from a thermos into the yerba-filled gourd and pass it to each person in the circle/group in turn. It is considered a breach of etiquette if anybody is skipped or if you take too long to drink on your turn and/or don't finish what you're given (which can be difficult sometimes because the bombilla is made of metal and it gets quite hot). Also, if you say "thank you" when you hand the gourd back to the leader, that means you're done.
Mate is the "green eggs and ham" of the Río de la Plata, if you will, and any foreigner who refrains from trying it will be just about as successful as Seuss's protagonist was against Sam's ham. I almost posted a version of the famous poem, substituting "Benito" for Sam and "un matecito" (little mate) for green eggs and ham, but I got bored typing it all up. Also, I don't actually know any Uruguayans named Benito, so I obviously couldn't include the story for fear of conveying a cultural inaccuracy.
Had I gone through with it, however, the name would have been the
only invalid part of the story. Uruguayans (and Argentinians) actually drink it everywhere--on boats, with goats, in the rain, on trains, in the dark, in trees, in cars, boxes, houses, here and there...you get the idea. One of my professors even shares a mate with his students mid-lecture from time to time. They have come up with a whole slew of interesting places to drink mate (see below). Dr. Seuss, eat your heart out.
In the end, I feel the same way about mate as I do about coffee and tea––I certainly don't mind drinking it occasionally, especially pre- or post-all-nighter, and I might even crave it now and again, but I'm never going to be an aficionado. Nope. I won't bring a mate home for any reason other than to cure the bouts of Uruguayan nostalgia that I'm bound to have in the coming years.
Here are a few of my favorite mate sightings since I've been in Uruguay:
Left: that's my shadow drinking it's first mate at the highest point in greater Montevideo, la Fortaleza General Artigas, during a field trip I took with the kids from Trampolines earlier in the semester.
Right: On the same trip, groups of us visited the old jail cells of the Fortaleza, where the curators have so kindly included life-sized replicas of a prisoner and his priest. Naturally, adding a mate to the scene gave the display a more realistic quality.
Left: That's our bus driver in Tandil, Argentina. He's got a propane-fueld hotplate (actually, an open flame) up front with him so that he can heat the water for his mate while he waits for us. [For the record, he did not use the hotplate while the bus was in motion. Argentinian bus drivers can be a bit sketchy at times, but there are limits.]
Right: This is Leticia, one of my classmates at Católica, teaching me how to prepare a mate (they use the verb "to arm", btw, which I think makes the whole process a lot more epic). One of my proudest accomplishments since being here, I'd say.
Above: I'm currently writing a paper for my internship about education, child labor, and the situation for children on the streets in Montevideo. This is one of many drawings that was included in a guidebook for people working to address such issues. I found this picture intriguing for a number of reasons (at this point I realize I've taken too many SOC/PSYC courses NOT to find things like this fascinating, but anyway...), not least among them the addition of the mate. Almost every drawing in the handbook features something similar.
