MATE, the national obsession

Mate (pronounced mah-tay). It is both the container and the drink, though the actual stuff that goes into the little mate cup is called yerba. I heard it once described as what green tea and grass would taste like if you put them together. That’s about right. I liked it. Our hosts, Cynthia and Ernesto treated us to mate on our first afternoon, and it is an afternoon ritual in Argentina and even more so in Uruguay, across the Rio Plata.

This is me fakin' it.  We did have mate
 with our hosts, however.

It goes like this. Dry yerba is placed at about a 45 degree angle (if possible) into a mate. Then a very small amount of hot water – never boiling – is poured into the mate by the host. He gives the mate to one person who drinks all of it through the silver metal straw called a bombillo, and then passes it back to the host, who adds a bit more hot water and then passes it to the next person. This continues until everyone has had a drink, all sharing the same bombillo. (Kinda like passing a joint.) The bombillo is flattened at the mouth end and has one type or another of filter attached to the end down in the cup in order to keep the yerba from clogging it. Never stir or move the bombillo once it has been put into the mate.

I’ve seen people here carrying a thermos of hot water and a mate cup and drink as they “need” to in the afternoon and saw two guys on the subte (subway) passing the cup and a family at a park sharing the drink.
More info:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_%28beverage%29

Buenos Aires – Observations

3 apples, 2 bananas = 91 cents; apples cost from $1 – 1.50 per kilo or 45-68 cents a lb.

Subway (Subte) ticket = 1.10 pesos or 28 cents; bus ticket maximum is 1.25 pesos or 32 cents.

Buses are very, very frequent, and are run privately, not by the city.

Do you want to park on the street? At a meter it’ll cost you 1.40 pesos (or 35 cents) per hour. Choose a lot and it could go to $2.50 an hour.



Need gas? 3.23 pesos/litre or 82 cents = @ $3.25 gallon. No bargain there.



Mothers Day with reflection



A café con leche is around $2.00, with three medialunas $3.00. A medialuna is shaped like a croissant, but smaller and more bread-like.

Mothers’ Day is this Sunday (Oct. 17) here in Argentina!



Every restaurant that we’ve eaten in so far has had leather placemats, some with the restaurant name embossed on them. Use those cows!

Remember when you learned that double l (ll) is pronounced “y”, so parilla is pronounced "pariya"? Well, forget about it. Here the double l is pronounced “sh”, so you eat at a “parisha”.

And they don’t speak Español. They speak Castellano, which, obviously, is pronounced “Casteshano” in Argentina.

No one says “Buenos dias.” They all say “buen dia,” which, of course, makes all the sense in the world.  (Good days - with an s?  Where did that come from?)

What it costs to enter Argentina from the US

  

1113 pesos - $280 -  that’s the cost of entering Argentina for two people; $140 each.   As we come down the stairs and around the corner into the customs area, the first question an attractive, cheery, uniformed young woman asks you is: “American?”  Yes.  “Go there into that line”.  And that’s it.  Pay-up ( they take VISA),  get a large sticker pasted into an end page of your passport (good for 10 years of free entry) and line-up for window #2 for the usual passport stamp and to hand over the little papers that we completed on the airplane.  Now you are free to collect luggage, go to the ATM machine and withdraw some money, and hail a taxi into town.  Only none of the three ATM machines (cajero automatico) have any money on this Saturday morning of a three-day weekend.  It appears that the rest of the  population decided to leave for the weekend and waited until they got to the airport to withdraw extra money!  So we use a VISA card to pay a driver in advance at the little window in the airport and we’re on our way.  It takes about 35 minutes to reach San Telmo.

By the way, the $140 is called a reciprocity fee; we charge Argentinians that much just to “apply” to come to the US, and they don’t get it back if they don’t pass muster!  We get free entry for 10 years and no application or visa to apply for.  That’ll probably be the next thing many countries will do to Americans.  Call it more reciprocity.  Thank our government for that one.

Mystras, the last intellectual site of the Byzantine Empire - Peloponnese Peninsula, Greece

The early-morning view looking over the valley below Mystras. 

Rick Steves says about Mystras (Europe through the Back Door, 2011), “Although it’s famous and on the way, skip Mystras.  Yes, it was once the cultural capital of the Byzantine Empire, but today there’s just not much to see.”   I beg to differ.
The site that Rick favors,  Monemvasia (also on the Peloponnese), he describes as having "ruins all across its Masada-like summit".  I spent hours atop Monemvasia and absolutely loved wandering the paths, but frankly, there are far less ruins there than in Mystras, a World Heritage- listed site.    As Lonely Planet points out, “Monemvasia was the principal commercial centre of Byzantine Morea – complementing Mystras, the spiritual centre.” 
 Do visit Mystras, and wander along the remains of streets, peering into what's left of houses and visiting a palace, a convent (still maintained by nuns and many cats), churches, chapels, libraries, a small museum, and a monastery and discover richly-covered frescoes still intact, and view colorful and intricately decorated manuscripts and books; this is where they wrote and drew them!  If you’re lucky you might be able to glomp onto a small tour group.  Brush-up on German, however, because Mystras seems to be off the path of American tourists.
As for Rick Steves, I like the guy.  I watch his TV programs, buy his books, listen to him on the radio and  have attended his talks in Edmonds, WA, and shop at his store.  I figure he must have had a bad day; too much rain, anxious to get back home at the end of a two month update-the-books trip, or whatever.  Sometimes it happens.  A place you love, someone else just pans or even worse, hates it!  I've been to Mystras twice; in the fall one year, and in the spring another.  We virtually had the place to ourselves!  Go and enjoy.  Imagine what it must have been like 300 or 400 years ago full of 40,000 citizens.  You won't regret stopping.

More buildings in this photo than on the entire top of Monemvasia