TheBanyanTree: Man, Do They Love Their Mate!

[Bobby Drummond]

I was told in Argentina that they loved their mate in Uruguay.  We found that to be true.

We took the short flight from Buenos Aires to Montevideo on a lazy Sunday afternoon and caught a cab to the waterfront along the Rio de la Plata.

There the water was not the milk chocolate brown as around the Parana delta or in the waters across from Buenos Aires.  It was far enough from the mouth of the second largest river in South America to take on a blue tint as it contained much more saltwater from the south Atlantic than freshwater from the delta. 

Along the waterfront local soccer games were played, people fished and strolled and people-watched.  Many watched the ocean traffic as vessels plied the open waters with some of the largest of those, huge container ships, heading into the port of Montevideo.  

Montevideo, like Buenos Aires, has a European bent in its architecture as well as distinct South American influence. One thing that caught my eye in the area just north of the waterfront was the ubiquitous "Tourist Police" guys. Were they needed?  Each time I saw them I hoped I wouldn't find out the hard way.

But everywhere you looked people were drinking mate.  It was the norm for them to walk around with a thermos shoved under one arm, with the armpit  providing the necessary squeezing power to prevent it from dropping to the ground.  They'd walk about, sit down, take their drinking gourd and bombilla out, fill the drinking gourd with yierba mate, ram the bombilla (a metal straw with small holes in the base) through the mate in the gourd, pour the water from the thermos over it, wait a short time -- for the yierba mate to swell and saturate -- and then suck on the business end of the bombilla.  When they finished the first cup they'd pour more hot water from the thermos over the wet mate in the gourd and drink again, then when that was depleted, pour more water again, and again until the mate had lost its "punch", eventually slinging the poor depleted yellow-green yierba out of the gourds to the ground.  The streets along the waterfront are littered with
 yierba mate castings.

Young, old, and in-between, all classes and all groups could be seen drinking mate.  Beats all that I'd ever seen.  If there is such a thing as mate addiction this is surely the homeland for it.

Yep, the Argentinians were right, 

Man, do they love their mate in Uruguay!