Matéando en el campo

In Russia: it's vodka. In Turkey: it's coffee. In England: it's tea. In many places it's a cigarette. It's the way you ritualistically share an experience with another person. By giving, you gain. You share your thoughts, your good humor. The process of lighting, steeping, or stirring becomes an extension of the conversation. In many cultures, participation in this ritual is more important than speaking the language or wearing the dress. A man from Senegal once told me, "you never refuse a cigarette in Africa". In Argentina, you never refuse yerba maté.

Pronounced "sherba matte" in Argentina; it's herbs in cup. Yerba comes from the Spanish "hierba", meaning herb or grass. Maté comes from the Quechua word for cup. You drink it in a wood or metal cup with a metal straw that's called a "bombilla". Not bitter, it tastes like green tea mixed with grass. Not impressed? The magic of yerba maté, in addition to it's stimulating qualities, is in how quickly you begin to associate the taste with new friends.

Over the weekend I jumped into the maté stream. While I'm not sure whether to blame the maté or my new friends, my sleep schedule was ruined. Maté can be steeped many times without loosing its flavor or becoming bitter. As a result, it's an extremely social drink. At dusk, I sat in a small trailer on the edge of a cornfield in Las Flores with Raul, his father, and two other farmers.

After heating the water on a small gas stove, Raul took a beat-up yerba cup and filled it with maté, which looks like grass clipping. He poured the water through the maté and passed it to me. I drank it all and passed it back. He filled it and passed it to his father. His father drank it in one sip and passed it back. Back and forth, we repeated the process until the water was gone.

Rule number one of matéando: don't say thank you. That seems to be a common thing in Argentina. Saying gracias usually elicits: "the heck are you saying thank you for?" I've struggled with it.

As the sky got darker behind old tractors and planting machines, conversation became livelier and more friendly. We spoke of politics and the difference between North and South America. They asked me about farm policy in the U.S., I told them we tend to subsidize farmers. They were agape. More on that in a later post. The social atmosphere broke only once. After several rounds of sharing the same maté through the same bombilla, the group turned to the lone American: "How common is swine flu in the US...?"

El Lechón

When I was in middle school, one of the coolest kids around was Chris. He was starting point guard on the basketball team, a team every middle school boy tried out for three times. He smoked, he talked about girls a lot. Somehow, I became friends with him.

When we got to high school, he started on the varsity team. For our entire freshman year, every time we saw each other, he'd open his palm to slap hands and slide into a fresh thumb-war grip. The whole 3 seconds it took for us to complete this salute and move on to class was both the coolest and the most awkward part of my day. Cool, for obvious reasons; awkward, because the handshake was as foreign to me as Tango dancing.

Here is Argentina, I feel that way almost daily. Over the weekend I went to Las Flores, four hours outside Buenos Aires. My buddy Raul was going home to vote. Unlike the US, Argentineans aren't allowed to absentee vote, and there's a penalty for not voting. It's part of the reason turnout for Sunday's elections was around 75%. Voting in Argentina therefore becomes a type of homecoming. Despite there being a ban on alcohol and social gatherings ahead of the elections, Raul mentioned there'd be a lechón: a party with a suckling pig as the centerpiece. This presented me with perfect opportunity to practice feeling awkward/cool.

Las Flores in winter isn't the most lively of towns. Most people are farmers; cattle and soy are the money-makers. The streets are lined with well-pruned trees and the houses look like converted general stores, which strangely, some of them are.

The lechón was at one of these general store/casas. Closing in on 11pm, the night streets were empty and the night air felt like Christmas. Walking towards the casa, the pumping cumbia sound could be heard outside and broke the police-enforced, pre-election silence. Inside, the house looked like an abandoned warehouse: neon painting on the walls, black lights, smoke everywhere, liter bottles of Quilmes beer. Within minutes I had met and kissed all of Raul's friends and second-hand smoked a cigarette and a half. I'll post on Argentine slang later. For now, I'll just say it was a quilombo. So much fun.

What I didn't realize was how men greet each other in Argentina's interior. In the cities, it's a tennis match handshake. In the campo, it's a kiss on the left cheek. And Raul had a lot of friends. As Raul put it later, "puro huevo". When they found out my birthday was Sunday, more kissing.

Tango Electronico
Bajofondo - Grand Guignol

Cumbia Argentina
El Hijo de la Cumbia - Cumbia de los Barrios

The music was a combination of cumbia and electronic tango. Find some examples above. Without a firm grasp of the Argentine accent or the slang, I was often reduced to nodding or changing the subject. Fortunately, the pig showed up. No utensils, just grab a bun and dig in; imagine 20 drunk Argentineans unencumbered by the possibility of offending any judicious Argentinean women.

The conversation swayed from women, to futbol, to Obama, and back to women. We made fun of the guy who owned the house. Everyone called him "el blanco", the white guy. It was his birthday, too. For some reason his friends tried to make signs for him in English. We laughed deep drunk laughs at misspelled signs that read "The Withe Bar" (where do you put the H?) and "Happy Berth Day."

We danced and drank into the night. I never got used to the accent or the kissing, perhaps I never will. No matter, for a whole night I felt the awkward/cool of attempted cultural integration. Eventually we ran out of beer and the cumbia rhythm slowed.

Saturday night shares little in common with my high school days, with one glaring exception. The cool almost always outweighs the awkward. As it was with my baller friend Chris, these moments are always the best of the trip.