I would like to describe some typical aspects of Argentine culture. Mate, tango, men and football, Argentine women and our obsession with being thin, etc
Name: Mabel Quiroga
I'm an EFL teacher in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I love experimenting with different ICT tools to enrich my teaching. But in this blog, I want to explore key aspects of Argentine culture
TomGrey on Football chants/Los ...
TomGrey on ARGENTINE MEN AND FO...
visited *loading* times
Football chants are repetitive chants generated by the crowd at football (soccer) matches, particularly professional ones. Throughout Europe and Latin America it is considered normal for the supporters to spend much of their time shouting at the players, opposing spectators, the referee, or just the world in general. They are intended to encourage the supporters' team, insult the opposition, or just to make noise.
The chants themselves can vary enormously, from the simple and repetitive to the topical and complex, encompassing tradition and vulgarity. An example of simple, though proud chanting is the Brazilian chant, sung by the fans at World Cup matches: "Eu sou brasileiro, com muito orgulho, com muito amor" (I am Brazilian, with a lot of pride, with a lot of love). They frequently contain vulgar or antagonistic lyrics; many of them would not be acceptable in a number of situations outside of a football stadium, and as long as the chants are not used outside of football, they are tolerated. Football chants generally contribute to fans' enjoyment of a game and its atmosphere, and are an integral part of football culture. They are also known as terrace chants - a terrace being the old standing areas in football grounds used until the 1990s in top-level football. Terraces are still used in lower league football where crowds and stands are smaller.
Two samples:
1) One of River Plate's most common chants
2) Manchester United's Glory Glory
In Argentina, football is known as the "crowds' passion" (pasión de multitudes). Most men are cazy about football and they follow their ritual every Sunday.
Sunday football ritual: They have lunch early, go to the stadium wearing T-shirts or hats with the colours of their favourite team, sometimes they also carry flags. While they watch the match, they listen to the sport commentator on the radio. After the match they go home to watch the summary of all the matches on T.V. The ritual finishes on Monday when they read the sport section of the newspaper and then talk with their co workers passionately about the results at the office.
Of course, mothers, wives and girlfriends seem to vanish for the football fan when his favourite team plays and specially when it plays against its " mortal" opponent.
Every football team has its "enemy". The most famous pair is Boca /River Plate. In La Plata city, the two opponent teams are Gimnasia / Estudiantes.
Believe it or not, when the Season Cup Competition starts nothing is more important than that. And don't mention the World Cup! The whole country stops when our national team plays. Click here to look at the pictures!
Argentine men may not have time for certain activities, but they will certainly be able to arrange their time table marvellously to watch a football match comfortably at home, or at a pub, or even travel to support their favourite team. No matter even if it is their wedding anniversary, children's birthday or mother's day. Nothing compares to football.
Football matches used to be exclusively masculine, but women have started to appear in the "field". There are female supporters, sport commentators and players. Are we going to be so fanatic?
Mate Friendships:
A Form of Intimacy 
| Mate is more than just good for the body; it's good for the soul. Drinking it can be a form of meditation or reflection - allowing the goodness to infuse into the body while stimulating and resting the mind. But this wholeness does not always happen alone.
In traditional Mate use, the cup is often shared among close friends and family - using the same straw, or bombilla. Reminiscent of the kind of closeness written about in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," where the characters become "water brothers" or "water sisters" when they drank from the same cup one after the other, those who share the Mate cup join in a kind of bond where the sharing of the health and meditation of the Yerba Mate is a sign of total acceptance and friendship. In Argentina and Brazil, fellow gouchos or farmers, knit together by the work of taming a wild land, will share a Mate around the camp fire to enhance their bonds of companionship. In Buenos Aires it's common to find a close-knit family or two lovers, or two or three best friends sharing a Mate on an outing to a local park or beach. In all these places, when an individual or group finally offers to include you in their Mate sharing, it should be taken as the highest possible compliment and entered in to with great appreciation. To avoid offending the offering party, there are a few rules you should follow as a part of a Mate fellowship. In a traditional Mate sharing event, there is one person who pours the hot water and serves up the cup. At a party of close friends, this person is often the host. At outings or at home, this responsibility may change from one sharing to the next. Generally the server will start a new infusion and then take the first drink. He or she will drink all the water in the Mate cup, taking several good sips until air is heard coming through the bombilla. Once done, the server will again fill the cup with hot water and hand it to the next drinker, who will also drink the entire contents of the cup before handing it back to the server. The cup will once again be filled and handed to the next person, who does the same. This process will continue, going around the circle many times, until there is no flavor left in the infusion. Some may worry that such an intimate sharing is unsanitary. It probably is, but no more than kissing. It is precisely this fact that makes sharing the Mate into such an intense friendship event. You don't share it with the casual friend. You share it with those with whom you would share your soul. Mate friendships are the best kind of friendships to have. |
What do you think about this?
Mate (pronounced /'ma.te/) is a highly caffeinated infusion prepared by steeping dried leaves of yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis) in hot water. It is the national drink in Uruguay and Argentina[1] and a common social practice in Paraguay and parts of Chile and Brazil.
Mate is served with a metal straw from a shared hollow calabash gourd. The straw is called a bombilla, in Spanish, and a bomba, in Portuguese, and it is traditionally silver. The gourd is known as a mate or a guampa, while in Brazil it has the specific name of cuia. Even if the water comes in a very modern thermos, the infusion is traditionally drank from mates or cuias. However, "tea-bag" type infusions of mate (mate cocido) have been on the market in Argentina for many years under such trade names as "Cruz de Malta" (Maltese Cross) and in Brazil under the name "Mate Leão" (Lion Mate).
As with other brewed herbs, yerba mate leaves are dried, chopped, and ground into a powdery mixture called yerba. The bombilla acts as both a straw and a sieve. The submerged end is flared, with small holes or slots that allow the brewed liquid in, but block the chunky matter that makes up much of the mixture. A modern bombilla design uses a straight tube with holes, or spring sleeve to act as a sieve. Bombilla (IPA: /bom'biʎa/ — [bom'biʃa] or [bom'biʒa] in Argentine and Uruguayan pronunciation) usually means "light bulb" in Spanish, but locally it is "little pump" or "straw".
Preparation
The method of preparing the mate infusion varies considerably from region to region, and it is hotly debated which method yields the finest outcome. However, nearly all methods have some common elements: the gourd is packed with an abundant amount of yerba, and hot water (typically at 70–80 °C [160–180 °F] and never boiling) is added.
Arranging the yerba
The most common preparation involves a careful arrangement of the yerba within the gourd before adding hot water. In this method, the gourd is first filled one-half to three-quarters of the way with yerba. After that, any additional herbs may be added for either health or flavor benefits; a practice most common in Paraguay, where people acquire herbs from a local yuyera (herbalist) and use the mate as a base for their herbal infusions. When the gourd is adequately filled, the preparer typically grasps it with their full hand, covering and roughly sealing the opening with their palm. Then the mate is turned upside-down, and shaken vigorously, but briefly and with gradually decreasing force, in this inverted position causing the finest, most powdery particles of the yerba to settle toward the preparer's palm and the top of the mate.
Once the yerba is settled, the mate is carefully brought to a near-sideways angle, with the opening tilted just slightly upward of the base. The mate is then shaken very gently with a side-to-side motion. This further settles the yerba inside the gourd so that the finest particles move toward the opening and the yerba is layered along one side. The largest stems and other bits create a partition between the empty space on one side of the gourd and the lopsided pile of yerba on the other.
After arranging the yerba along one side of the gourd, the mate is carefully tilted back onto its base, minimizing further disturbances of the yerba as it is re-oriented to allow consumption. Some avalanche-like settling is normal, but is not desirable. The angled mound of yerba should remain, with its powdery peak still flat and mostly level with the top of the gourd. A layer of stems along its slope will slide downward and accumulate in the space opposite the yerba (though at least a portion should remain in place).
All of this careful settling of the yerba ensures that each sip contains as little particulate matter as possible, creating a smooth-running mate. The finest particles will then be as distant as possible from the filtering end of the bombilla. With each draw, the smaller particles would inevitably move toward the bombilla, but the larger particles and stems filter much of this out. A sloped arrangement provides consistent concentration and flavor with each filling of the mate.
Now the mate is ready to receive the bombilla. Many people choose to pour warm water into the mate before adding the bombilla, while others insist that the bombilla is best inserted into dry yerba. Wetting the yerba by gently pouring cool water into the empty space within the gourd until the water nearly reaches the top, and then allowing it to be absorbed into the yerba before adding the bombilla, allows the preparer to carefully shape and "pack" the yerba's slope with the bombilla's filtering end, which makes the overall form of the yerba within the gourd more resilient and solid. Dry yerba, on the other hand, allows a cleaner and easier insertion of the bombilla, though care must be taken so as not to overly disturb the arrangement of the yerba. Such a decision is entirely a personal or cultural preference. The bombilla is inserted with your thumb on the upper end of the bombilla, at an angle roughly perpendicular to the slope of the yerba, so that its filtering end travels into the deepest part of the yerba and comes to rest near or against the opposite wall of the gourd.
Brewing
Now the yerba may be brewed. If the bombilla was inserted into dry yerba, the mate must first be filled once with warm water as above, then be allowed to absorb it completely (which generally takes no more than two or three minutes). Treating the yerba with cool water before the addition of hot water is essential, as it protects the herb from being scalded and from the chemical breakdown of some of its desirable nutrients. Hot water may then be added by carefully pouring it, as with the cool water before, into the cavity opposite the yerba, until it reaches almost to the top of the gourd when the yerba is fully saturated. Care should be taken to maintain the dryness of the swollen top of the yerba beside the edge of the gourd's opening.
Once the hot water has been added, the mate is ready for drinking, and it may be refilled many times before going "flat" and losing its flavor. When this occurs, the mound of yerba can be pushed from one side of the gourd to the other, allowing water to be added along its opposite side; this revives the mate for additional re-fillings.
Mate is traditionally drunk in a particular social setting, such as family gatherings or with friends. One person (known in Spanish as the cebador) assumes the task of server. Typically, the cebador fills the gourd and drinks the mate completely to ensure that it is free of particulate matter and of good quality. The server subsequently refills the gourd and passes it to the next drinker who likewise drinks it all. The ritual proceeds around the circle in this fashion until the mate becomes lavado ("washed out" or "flat"), typically after the gourd has been filled about ten times or more depending on the yerba used (well-aged yerba mate is typically more potent, and therefore provides a greater number of refills). When one has had his fill of mate, he or she politely says thank you to the cebador passing the mate back at the same time.
The drink has a pungent taste like a cross between green tea and coffee, with hints of tobacco and oak. Sugar or honey are sometimes added if desired, creating mate dulce, sweet mate (mate without sugar is called mate amargo or bitter mate). Normally a preference for mate dulce or mate amargo is one or the other. It is considered bad for the gourd (especially for the natural (squash or wood) ones) to be used for mate dulce so it is normal for households with drinkers of both kinds to have two separate gourds.
Traditionally, natural gourds are used, though wood vessels, bamboo tubes and gourd-shaped mates, made of ceramic or metal (stainless steel or even silver) are also common. Gourds are commonly decorated with silver, sporting decorative or heraldic designs with floral motifs.
Both the wood vessels and the gourds must undergo curing to get a better taste before being used for the first time and to ensure the long life of the gourd. Typically, to cure a gourd, the inside is first scraped with the tip of a bombilla to remove loose gourd particles. Mate herb and hot water is added next, and the mixture poured into the gourd. The mixture is left to sit overnight and the water is topped off periodically through the next 24 hours as the gourd absorbs the water. Finally the gourd is scraped out, emptied, and put in sunlight until completely dry.
It is common for a black mold to grow inside the gourd when it is stored. Some people will clean this out, others consider it an enhancement to the mate flavor.
Legendary Origins
The Guaraní people started drinking mate in the region that now includes Paraguay, southern Brazil, and north-east Argentina. The Guaraní have a legend that says that the Goddesses of the Moon and the Cloud came to the Earth one day to visit it but they instead found a Yaguareté (a kind of jaguar) that was going to attack them. An old man saves them, and, in compensation, the Goddesses gave the old man a new kind of plant, from which he could prepare a "drink of friendship". [2]
See also
External links
Template by Splinder.com | header image credit: Markus Gann © www.begann.de
