Just Published: Art Review on NYAB Blog

My latest published piece of writing just hit the blogosphere today. It's a review of a new photography exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York on the NY Art Beat Blog. For now, it's on the blog's front page, and I've provided a direct link to it here.

Calmness @ JFK

The American Airlines terminal at JFK airport is calm by design. Gently curving trusses of white metal swing over the check-in counters, framing the top of a detailed mural of a world brought closer together, presumably by air travel. Seattle’s Space Needle sits just meters away from San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, which is itself not far from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Eiffel Tower, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The color palate is very light, and looks even lighter under the ceiling.

But it’s calm for another reason, too: It’s completely empty. Even if my flight is full (and with the calculations that airlines do in these days of expensive energy to make sure not to fly with light loads, it very well might be), the experience I’ll remember is of a single line of very quiet travelers waiting to pass through one metal detector. The woman staring at our x-rayed belongings called out in a desultory voice “Please remove all jackets and shoes.” Her eyes never moved from the screen. On my way to gate 3, I must have walked by eight hundred empty black leather seats.

P.S. On my way to London yesterday evening, I had an empty seat next to me. Rough times for airlines might mean good times for fliers. For now.

Love (1): Political Culture

On Wednesday of last week, every business in the province of Cordoba closed for the day so that a census could be conducted. All citizens were supposed to remain in their homes and wait for someone to come to their door.

The governor of Cordoba, Juan Schiaretti, organized this provincial census because his administration believed that INDEC, the national organization that conducts censuses every decade and estimates the rate of growth for the intervening years, was underestimating the actual population of Cordoba. This would mean that this comparatively wealthy province, a net-donor to the national government’s coffers, was getting short shrift on federal monies disbursed from Buenos Aires.

This was no theoretical exercise. Schiaretti, upon finding that he couldn’t balance his province’s budget, cut some (or all) of the pensions that had been held in the province’s pension fund. Understandably, this action was met with protests in July and August, parts of which became violent. It’s unclear who was behind the violence, but it is clear that the governor was, in part, responsible for his situation. He had been a vocal opponent of President Cristina Kirchner’s proposed taxes on agricultural producers, the controversial taxes that were voted down in a dramatic late-night Senate session in July. Had the tax hike passed, the additional revenue available to Cordoba might have obviated the need to cut these pensions.

I’m not totally certain of all the details here, but the preliminary census results came out two days ago. There are officially 3,216,993 people in Cordoba Province, a number that is 123,000 lower than what INDEC had estimated. So in addition to the complaints people had about the cost of the census, the questions that were asked, the way in which it was conducted, and the fact that not all workers were paid for the forced holiday, the basic goal of the census was undermined by its unanticipated results.

So although I'm heading back to a country in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, I will miss the lively public political culture here.

Love and Hate (Intro): The Trick Question

A few months ago, back when we were living in Buenos Aires, an Argentine asked me:

“So, what don’t you like about Argentina?”

This, I now know, is a trick question. Argentines are famously proud of their country, and Portenos even more so. The correct response, I have since learned, is something along the lines of “I love Argentina; the best things about it are the food and the people.” Had I been speaking in Spanish, I likely would’ve stuck to these standard talking points. But at that particular moment, against my better judgment and ignoring the plaintive look on my girlfriend’s face, I let fly a list of complaints (in English), a litany that had been brewing for weeks.

I thankfully can’t remember what I said then. I remember backpedaling intensely afterward, trying to undo the damage that my ignorant, arrogant North American invective, had done.

Since I’m about to leave Argentina for an extended stateside-stay, I’d like to throw caution to the wind and tell you a few things I will and won’t miss about living here.

Choquequirao

Got back on Tuesday from a week-long visa-renewal trip to Peru, four days of which were spent hiking to and from an Inca site called Choquequirao (pronounced Choke-uh-key-raoh). It's about 100 kilometers west of Cusco and not too far from its more famous neighbor, Machu Picchu.

Although they are close to one another, of similar styles, and were constructed virtually contemporaneously, there are many distinctions between these Inca settlements. I've not visited Machu Picchu (yet!), but was told repeatedly that it is an "intact" ruin, while Choquequirao was plundered by French treasure hunters in the early 20th century. Furthermore, Machu Picchu was rediscovered in 1911, and its buildings are far more completely (if not entirely) excavated. Only over the last twenty years has Choquequirao been the focus of archaeological study, and to date less than one-third of its ruins have been uncovered.

But what really distinguishes Choquequirao (and what initially attracted me to visit) is that, when compared to the mega-attraction of Machu Picchu, Choquequirao is all but empty. While Machu Picchu can be reached by a Peru Rail train, Choquequirao sits 32 kilometers away from the nearest town - and that route is only accessible by foot or by mule. So it's not surprising that Machu Picchu gets 100 times as many visitors in a year as Choquequirao does. And the trail, although it was hard, incorporating five vertical miles into its 24 horizontal ones, was quite peaceful and quiet, aside from the occasional passing mules and a few other trekkers. That's a far cry from the parade of 400 tourists who start the classic four-day "Inca Trail to Machu Picchu" every day. Depending on whom you ask, it takes somewhere between a week and a month for the Choquequirao trail to see that many hikers.

More on Choquequirao to come; in the meantime, I've put up a bunch more pictures here.

Learning Spanish in Argentina Today

The last time I began studying a foreign language, I was in a classroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan watching a heavily made-up sixty-year-old play out conversations between hand puppets she had named, cleverly, Pierro, Pierrete, and Papa Pierre. Papa Pierre kept getting angry with Pierro and Pierrette for being late to school, but it was our fault. The puppets had to wake up, shower, get dressed, and have breakfast, and it took us, 14-year-old Americans just beginning to learn French, way too long to conjugate all of the reflexive verbs.

My classes in castellano, the dialect of espanol spoken in Argentina, started off in a familiar way, albeit without puppets. My teacher in Buenos Aires, Natacha, quickly taught me a few verbs: to be, to go, to have. I learned a few simple conversations by heart – about who I am, where I’m from, what I do – and armed with that and a few more basics (numbers, letters, food and drink, clothing), I was ready to take my castellano to the calle. And although everything had to be happening in the simple present tense (yesterday I watch a movie; today I walk to a cafe; tomorrow I work at home) I managed to get around.

Everyone always says that the best way to learn a language is to go and live in a place where it is spoken. What they don’t always acknowledge is everything else you’ll learn about that place, besides the language. My lessons here haven’t only been a means to acquire the language in order to better understand the culture; they have offered me a window onto the culture itself, albeit a window with a very specific point of view.

What follows is a vocabulary lesson from Argentina today. Hopefully, in these few words, I can show you what I mean.

- - - - - - - -

Inflacion

When Natacha taught me how to order food in a restaurant she pointed out that although the menu reproduced in our textbook was very typical of Buenos Aires, the prices of the items had changed remarkably since the textbook’s publication. She looked with nostalgia at this relic of 2004, when a milanesa (a breaded piece of meat that is a lot like schnitzel, but which is made more often with beef) cost four pesos.

At the time of that class, about six weeks ago, four pesos bought only a café con leche. (Now, in Buenos Aires, the price is probably closer to five pesos.) Sitting in the restaurant where we had our one-on-one classes three mornings a week, Natacha and I compared the real restaurant’s menu with the outdated one in the textbook. Sure enough, the prices of nearly every item had doubled in the four years since the textbook’s publication.

Inflacion is on everybody’s mind in Argentina, from the newspaper reporters who are tracking its effects internationally to the shoppers at the grocery store finding that the prices of basic foodstuffs keep going up. While the sticker shock news from the US appears to be primarily focused on the price of gas, here the focus is on food, and I’ve been noticing the different ways in which restaurants change their prices here in Cordoba. Some have the foresight to use ink that can be easily removed. Others put opaque stickers over the original prices listed on wall-mounted signs. When looking for a nice restaurant to take Beki to for her birthday, I came across a well-dressed maitre d’ working in his off-hours, erasing the penciled-in prices on the leather-bound menus and penciling in new ones.

I had seen reports of changes in the price of food here before, but never one as concrete as the one La Voz del Interior published this past week. They listed the prices of an imaginary basket (la canasta) of typical foods collected the previous Saturday (June 26th) in four major Argentine supermarkets, and compared them to the prices of the same foods on March 1. Nearly everything an Argentine family of four could need had gone up in price over the four-month period. Ground beef (a kilo was up 39.3%), spaghetti (500 grams, up 31.9%), butter (200g, up 7.4%) Coca-Cola (2.25 liters, up 10.5%), and toilet paper (six rolls, up 35.7%) had all risen in price. Even if fruits and vegetables were a mixed bag (the prices of apples and lettuce rose by more than 30% each, while those of potatoes, carrots, and oranges all fell by 10% or more), the overall effect was that the basket now costs 16.5% more than it did when the farmers first struck.

That farmer’s strike (huelga) will bring us to our next word, but first one more new word, one I thankfully haven’t heard in a little while: desabastecemiento. Though it has no English equivalent, it could be defined as “the inability of a society to adequately supply or provide for its citizens.” Perhaps you’ve seen newspaper reports of the food shortages that have been afflicting this country. Perhaps you’ve heard about the rationing of certain products. Perhaps you’ve seen pictures of bare refrigerator shelves in supermarkets, shelves that would normally be stocked with fresh bags of milk and dairy products, with kilo upon kilo of the grass-fed beef for which this country is famous, the beef which also once made it rich. The roadblocks (paros) have been lifted, and the most recent of the three farmers’ strikes has been called off, but the disagreement between the major farmers’ associations and the government of Cristina Kirchner over how to tax exports of soybeans – the crop that is currently making some people in this country rich – and how to distribute the wealth the beans bring, is far from over.

Something worth considering: When there’s a stoppage in the usual provisioning of Argentina’s population with food and other necessities, there’s a long and technical-sounding word for it, desabastecemiento. People in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods bang pots and pans in protest. But not too long ago, tens of thousands of people gathered to draw attention to the fact that many of their countrymen, the ones who live far from the wealthy capital, far from the soybean-stuffed provinces of Cordoba and Entre Rios, go without food on a regular basis. The words were much shorter and simpler: Hambre. Pobreza. And, as is evidenced by the ever present garbage-pickers who roam the streets of our neighborhood here in Cordoba, their situation hasn't improved much in the past year. 

- - - - - - - -

Huelga

This week is my last in a month-long Espanol Para Extranjeros class at the National University of Cordoba. Three hours a day, five days a week, for four weeks. To learn the past tense, our teacher Veronica had us read a postcard that describes a trip to Bariloche. The writer devotes her last paragraph the delay she experienced on her return: “Tuve problemas para volver porque había huelga de personal de aeropuerto así que llegué a Buenos Aires dos días de demorra.” What kept our fictional speaker from reaching Buenos Aires on time? A huelga, or strike. “Just like the one being waged by municipal workers here in Cordoba,” Veronica explained.

Wait, wait. I had known about the farmers’ recurrent strikes. But the municipal workers of Cordoba?

When Beki and I first arrived in Cordoba, one of the most unusual things was to see street vendors selling choripan, a local sandwich of chorizo and bread (pan) on the main city square, the Plaza San Martin. “Chori, chori, chori,” they would call out from their hastily erected stands, usually no more than a table of ingredients, a grill mounted on two metal sawhorses, and a ring of linked sausages, cooking slowly. The lines of people were long – just like the lines for the buses, and at the banks, and waiting at the kiosks where bus tokens were sold – and when the wind changed, the line would waver as everyone in it moved to try to avoid the smoke from the grill. By 11am every day, the plaza was filled with the smell of chorizo, and felt vaguely festive.

Like most festivals, this was short lived: Most of these food vendors are now gone. The municipal workers have returned from their strike – the patrolmen who write tickets for illegal street peddling included.

- - - - - - - -

Colador

Life has been, by linguistic necessity, pretty basic. Then you need to buy things.

How would you describe a strainer if you didn’t know that word? What about a metal collapsible drying rack for laundry? Trying to find the simple necessities that don’t come with your “fully furnished” apartment (departemento amoblado) in Cordoba isn’t easy. I described what I later learned to call a colador as “a thing that is something like a spoon, but which is used for tea, where the water goes through it, but the tea leaves do not.” And after nearly five minutes of hand gestures, broken Castellano, and explanations that I was not looking for an electric clothes-drying appliance in a supermarket, I finally managed to find a drying rack that holds a load of clean, wet laundry. I can’t remember what the word was, but now that we have one, I don’t think I’ll need to discover it again.  

Cacerolazo in Cordoba

Over the past three days, a long weekend that included a Monday holiday called “Dia de la Bandera,” the flags came out, although probably not in the time or manner some people might have hoped. Despite a stadium in Buenos Aires full of fans clad in sky blue and white, there was no cause for celebration on Sunday when the national team barely eked out a 1-1 tie in a World Cup qualifying game against lowly Ecuador. But the flags did fly tonight when, at precisely 8pm, a cacerolazo started in city centers across Argentina. A form of protest typified by the banging of pots – in Spanish cacerola, hence the name – this cacerolazo, organized at least in part by text message, showed that even on the 97th day of the conflict between the government of Cristina Kirchner and the group of agribusinessmen known here as el campo, this disagreement that began with a hike of export taxes on soy and corn looks very far from a resolution.

We heard the car horns first. Our apartment is in a section of the city called Nueva Cordoba, which is packed with new high-rise apartment buildings, many of which are owned by members of the campo. As our nighttime doorman Marco said with a grand gesture, “All of this is made of soy.”  From our balcony we could see people standing on terraces banging pots and pans, clicking away with cameras, holding up cell phones, and yes, waving flags. After half an hour of noise, Rebekah and I headed to the shopping mall in the center of Cordoba which fronts onto a plaza and a prominent six-way intersection. I’d seen fans of the River Plate football team celebrating their national championship there two weeks earlier.

We found what might have been five or seven thousand people thronging the streets, armed with drums, empty plastic coke bottles, whistles, party noisemakers, and pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils so battered and dented that they must have been set aside for this very purpose. Parents carried children on their shoulders; cars roving the side streets were filled with entire families, and they honked their horns, flashed their lights, and trailed waving flags from their windows. As we got closer to the mass of people, which had halted the progress of, and then surrounded, a line of cars, trucks, and even an empty bus, everyone became very quiet. I noticed an eerie plume of smoke rising from the middle of the throng, the place where moments ago, the flags were being waved most wildly. A number of people had both of their hands raised, reinforcing a silence and stillness that was unsettling. Suddenly, waves of a song, the national anthem perhaps, swept through the crowd, which began to bounce, clap, and make noise even more energetically than before. 

Two-and-a-half hours later the television was still broadcasting live images of city squares around the country filled with people. Here on the corner of San Lorenzo and Chacabuco, though, only the occasional car horn could be heard passing by.

Our Palermo Apartment, Before Leaving

Our next-door neighbor in apartment #5 had been watching TV for twenty straight hours. It started at around 5am on Friday night/Saturday morning and didn’t stop until after midnight the next night. Until that point, we had only thought ill of our other neighbor: She sings warbling songs with her band twice a week and uses an annoying “all major scales, all the time” method to teach her voice students. She is also training her dog in an unusual manner; from here it sounds like she’s saying the Spanish word for “bitch,” over and over.

Life here isn’t perfect but I’ll be sad to leave our little loft in Palermo.

The bedroom and bathroom are perched atop a flight of stairs, yet to call it a “loft” oversimplifies this compact and complicated pile of materials. Opposite our front door, a brick wall rises from the sunken concrete floor. It’s one meter wide, one brick deep, and it runs almost the entire height of the apartment. The bricks are a pinkish color and seem even pinker surrounded by thickly applied pink mortar. The wall nominally buttresses the kitchen ceiling/bathroom floor, but really its role is more symbolic than supporting, announcing a bit too proudly: “This is a Loft!”

Despite this not being the most beautiful wall ever built, despite the apartment’s being put together in a way that is less than exact, it is cleverly constructed. Por ejemplo: On the loft’s upper level, a bridge connects the wood floor of the bedroom to the tile floor of the bathroom. A square-shaped panel of gray metal wire reinforced with a few metal bars, this bridge is connected to the brick wall on its third side and has a waist-high metal railing on the side that overlooks the front door. This floor panel creaks when you step on it, but only yesterday I realized that this translucent bridge allows more light to pass from the skylight above through to the kitchen below than an opaque surface would.

Clever, no? This way, at least some filtered daylight falls onto the kitchen’s twin marble countertops. The marble and the brick are two conspicuous material displays of luxury in this otherwise unremarkable concrete apartment, and they help the owners market the place to us extranjeros. To rent this furnished apartment in Palermo Viejo for a month costs a little more than seven hundred US Dollars. As with so much else in this country, what to us seems reasonably cheap looks shockingly overpriced to the locals. 

------------

Before we go to a new city and a new living situation with new idiosyncrasies, I’d like to mention a few more details from our apartment that have added dashes of unexpected color to our life here.

Garbage goes out to our metal garbage tree, a wire box mounted on a steel post stuck into the sidewalk. The Buenos Aires city government’s TV commercials tell us to bring our basura to the curb between 8 and 9 pm, Sunday through Friday nights (and never when it’s raining) so official trucks can make their pickups overnight. Far more frequent are the cartoñeros, people who troll the streets at all hours collecting cardboard and paper. The carts vary from smaller pushcarts that look like converted supermarket models to larger rickshaw-style ones mounted on car tires complete with hubcaps. These latter carts are often laden with impossibly large nylon bags brimming with paper, cardboard, and broken-down boxes of all sorts. Occasionally a group of garbage-pickers will ride by in a horse-drawn cart, retrieving metal and other recyclables from this city’s refuse heaps.

------------

Let’s talk about water. Our water heater is a 30-liter gas-powered cylinder that sits under the kitchen counter; every time it starts working, we can hear it fire up. This is one of my favorite sounds ever since the week when we didn’t hear it. We saw our handyman Ricardo every day that week when he came to relight the heater’s pilot light.

Opposite the water heater is a small washing machine. It takes all day to (loudly!) wash a load of clothes, and the better part of another day to dry them. Rebekah found a laundress on our block, Cristina, and she’s become one of our best friends in the neighborhood.

We have other fun appliances: A bidet in our bathroom that gets dangerously hot when the sink is turned on in the kitchen. (Think about it.) A voltage regulator powering our twin Macs that occasionally sighs mechanically beneath our feet. A stove that we light with matches, wooden stick matches that are sold in red boxes of two hundred and twenty two.  

------------

Much of this will change; some of it will not. In any case, we’re off to Cordoba tomorrow.

Some Pictures of Buenos Aires

I took a bunch of pictures and put together a few into a slideshow. These are pretty typical tourist sites, except for the few at the end, which are more specific to our neighborhood and our day to day life. 

The link is here. Hope you enjoy. 

Drinking Coffee in a Maté Culture

In my neighborhood of Palermo Viejo on Calle Jorge Luis Borges is a café called Brownie. The small store – one table inside and two more on the sidewalk – has its menu of coffee drinks written in chalk on a cappuccino-colored wall behind the counter, and there’s usually a plate of brownie bites to nibble on. It feels like a bit like a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, aside from the brisk business it does selling cookies to the girls from the two nearby Catholic schools, whose plaid skirts and loud conversation remind me more of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But all of this is beside the point, because if you’ve made it to Brownie, you’ve found what might be the best espresso in Buenos Aires.

- - - - - -

Drinking coffee in BA is challenging. The espresso is quite bitter and it occasionally tastes chewy, even when you don’t find a few stray grounds at the bottom of your cup. Porteños don’t seem to notice: They mostly drink coffee with milk, more of it in their cafe con leche than in their smaller cortado. These two drinks can be ordered anywhere and cortado is a particularly wonderful creation, with a flexible definition: sometimes it’s piping hot, other times lukewarm, and the small cup, mug, or glass in which it is served may or may not be topped with frothed milk.

Judging by the reactions I’ve gotten when I order straight espresso, drinking it solo is a rarity here, and I have taken to smothering mine with one of Argentina’s huge packets of sugar. Except when I’m in the capable hands of César and Ornella, the co-owners of Brownie, that is. How do they get it right? According to Ornella: “We use the best coffee, the best chocolate for our brownies, the best of everything.” Their beans are domestically roasted and are used in other cafes, places whose espresso can’t compare with Brownie’s, which makes César and Ornella seem even more like alchemists. Whatever the reason, I’ll just keep supporting them at it, one tiny glass at a time.

- - - - - -

Brownie has been open for eight months. Its small location in a wealthy, touristy neighborhood, along with its decidedly Norte Americano name and fare mean that it is not only an exceptional joint in this city but an exception to the city’s general rules for coffee. Those rules are changing, however, as is the coffee market. Starbucks has been planning its entry into the Argentine market for over a year and now their future location at the Alto Palermo mall is marked with a sign reading “Muy Pronto.” (The store is set to open by the end of this month, but unless they’re offering soy lattes, I’m not that interested.) The company, which took its time to hone its business model to fit the local palate, has reportedly come up with their answer: the dulce de leche Frappuccino.

Our Lovely Green Lady of the Beans is hardly the only one changing the coffee game in town; Havanna, one of a number of coffee shop chains here, has just started offering coffee-to-go, in convenient and familiar-looking paper cups with plastic lids. Paper cups and plastic lids: just two among many things taken for granted in the US that are, for better or worse, being consciously imagined and carefully introduced here in BA.

This is a big change, and to understand just how big, you’ve got to know that coffee-to-go in this city is presently available in one of two ways: Folks who live or work close enough to a café can get delivery, which comes on a silver platter in a glass or mug. I don’t know how the used dishes get returned but the sight of a waiter walking down the street, as if the desk, cash register, or kitchen counter that is his destination is just another more distant table in his serving zone, is common enough to assume that they’ve figured that part out. Alternatively, you can buy an open-topped styrofoam cup of coffee from one of the many salespeople who troll the streets of Palermo every morning. They work regular beats, pushing wire-framed carts that hold between nine and twelve thermos bottles, the red ones filled with coffee, the blue ones with milk. Once you’ve made your purchase though, you’re trapped with a brimming cup of steaming coffee: It’s more like “coffee-to-stay” – until the level and temperature of the drink have dropped enough that you’re willing to brave the walk down the street.

One can’t say enough about how great the café culture in Buenos Aires is. The number of people sitting at sidewalk tables, conversing over coffee and medialunas at 9:30am on a Friday morning, is, simply put, an urban miracle. One might reasonably worry that if cafe para llevar catches on here, it might detract from that culture in some way. I’ll keep my eyes open.

- - - - - -

No account of Argentina’s hot liquid stimulants would be complete without mentioning maté.

It’s the country’s unofficial national drink, and although not everybody likes it, nearly everyone has an opinion about it. To understand this tea that is drunk throughout Latin America, just imagine the exact opposite of the “high tea” they serve at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. If English tea – that dainty hot drink in a porcelain cup that contains not a shred of leaf – is your WASPy mother-in-law, then maté – drunk in groups through a shared metal straw out of a hollowed-out gourd packed with leaves – is your stoned college roommate.

Walk through any weekend market and you’ll not only find the gourds (called matés) for sale, but you’ll also see them in near-constant use by the vendors. Any supermarket maté aisle (to find it, just follow your nose) will likely stock ten or more different brands of loose maté leaves in brick-shaped bags of varying sizes. The brands’ names and the packaging alone tell you a fair amount about maté: Some packages talk about the tea and its taste (many are called suave, or smooth), the names of others are often allusions, some geographical (one popular brand takes its name, Taragüi, from the indigenous name for Argentina’s maté-growing Corrientes province), others conceptual (Nobleza Gaucha, another brand, translates as “Gaucho Nobility,” the behavior expected of the Pampas’ cowboys as well as the name of an early Argentine silent film). From such an array, how can one choose? Go for a maté that has “less dust,” or one that comes “with stems?” One brand is is so insistent about the quality of its product that it resorts to repetition (“this smooth maté does not relax and does not relax and does not relax”) – is this better or worse than the one that is simply called “Romance?”

I had my first taste of maté one evening last week at the house of two friends of Rebekah’s, Mirta and Oscar. (Unlike coffee, you can’t order a maté in a café, not as far a I can tell.) The tea came with a much-needed lesson; maté may look a bit more laid back than Western-style tea but it has many more rules associated with its consumption. First and most important, the water must be heated but not boiled. The leaves, enough for about twenty pots of tea, are put into the maté and then shaken up to eliminate any air pockets and to evenly distribute big and small leaf pieces. The hot water is then added slowly until the leaves are saturated. There will be some extra watery tea – this is the first maté, and it is not to be drunk. The cebador, the person who serves the maté (this word is not used in any other context), must suck the liquid through the metal straw, or bombilla, and spit it out. Then he (or she – everyone drinks the stuff, and anyone can be cebador) adds water to make the maté and passes the vessel to the first drinker and the cycle begins. Each drinker drains the maté of its liquid and then returns it to the cebador, who then refills the maté for the next person. The cebador is last in the cycle to drink, after which the maté begins its way around again. People sit like this for hours.  

We only drank our maté for about an hour, but that gave me enough time to learn a few interesting facts from our hosts. First, because the temperature of the water is so important and must remain constant, the best implement is a thermos, and you’ll see people carrying them all around the city. There are even signs in cafes advertising hot water where they’ll fill your thermos for a peso. I was told that maté should not be drunk on ordinary streets – only in Uruguay and Paraguay, where the drink is even more popular than in Argentina, is this considered acceptable behavior. As our cebador Oscar put it, you need three things to really enjoy maté: “a newspaper, sunshine, and to be sitting in a square.”

According to our hosts, the lower and middle classes favor the drink more than the rich, and the old drink more of it than the young do. Maté can also be flavored with bits of orange or grapefruit peel, coffee grounds, or even chocolate, but we drank ours straight and sweet, with Oscar adding a small spoonful of sugar to the brew before every pass. It had a pleasant warmth and a dull sweetness, and after eight cycles, I felt pretty good. Awake and aware, but not jittery, not buzzed. Not surprising: Maté has a type of caffeine in it, which is called “mateine.”

The taste of maté is tough to describe, but it has a definite burnt flavor, and it can numb your mouth in the same way as strong coffee or red wine. Perhaps I’ll get better at describing it as I get better at making it: I’m incorporating the occasional maté into my afternoons here, drinking it from my very own redwood maté and through a supermarket-bought, stainless steel bombilla. That’s me, Jonah: the gringo wannabe gaucho. 

Starting somewhere

You've gotta, or so goes the saying. So I'm going to start with guidelines:

The writing on this blog will be straightforward and as cleanly edited as possible.

I will only write about subjects and events that are reasonably close to me, with an eye toward direct reporting. I'm going to stick to what I can see, hear, and experience and my posts will contain within them something of the place(s) where they were written. 

I will read and research widely and carefully in order to write informed posts. 

Written posts will be occasional and thematic. 

Lastly, while staying within the guidelines I've just set out (striving for clarity and accuracy; choosing subjects based on proximity and access; ensuring that the occasional posts are coherent and interesting), I plan to incorporate my awareness of "goings on in the world" by referencing the "stuff" that's informing my point of view at the moment. Those references will take various forms: links, quotes, references, pictures. 

Is all this too obvious? Did I just over-think something as simple as a blog? 

If so, I apologize, and the place to start is here. We're at the end of the beginning. I've cleared my throat long enough. More to come.