G´day, mate

As noted, we were in Uruguay the past weekend. Uruguay doesn´t have too much to see in the traditional tourist sense, but the Orientals there are very chilled out and the meat is excellent (probably even better than Argentina). In fact, the Orientals live for meat. If you´re a vegetarian and/or Hindu you really have to watch out there, as they tend to slip beef into dishes that would normally be vegetarian elsewhere. For example, our packaged breadsticks were made with "refined bovine fat". Mmmmm....

If there´s one thing that the Orientals love as much as their meat is their mate (two syallables), hence the seemingly incongruous title to this post. What is mate? Well, to quote one source, "Mate is a highly caffeinated infusion prepared by steeping dried leaves of yerba mate in hot water. It is the national drink in Uruguay and Argentina and a common social practice in Paraguay and parts of Chile, Brazil, Lebanon, and Syria." Here´s a picture of mate:



The way it works is that you put the yerba mate leaves into a calabash gourd and add hot water and then drink it through a metal straw that has a strainer on it. In Uruguay you very often see people (usually men) walking down the street with the gourd in one hand and a hot water thermos in the other hand or tucked in the crook of their elbow. Karen and I were constantly boggled by how inconvenient this practice looked, as essentially your hands/arms are always occupied with mate tools. We also saw for sale some gourds made out of cow hoofs, which look especially gross, particularly the hairy ones.



One could also purchase a manly leather bag that would hold your thermos, a gourd or two, and your extra yerba mate for when the leaves lost their flavor.

We´ve seen people drinking their mate in Brazil and Argentina, but definitely not to the same extent that you see it in Uruguay.

OK, enough about mate. In Uruguay, we visited 2 of the 3 main tourist hubs, Colonia del Sacramento and Montevideo. The third is Punta del Este, which is the main beach resort for the east coast of South America.

Colonia is a beautiful colonial-era city just across the river from Buenos Aires. It was absolutely pouring down with rain most of the time we were there, but we could still get the sense of the place and how nice it was. Colonia is recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.







After Colonia we visited the capital, Montevideo. Montevideo really feels like an oversized town. Even though it has more than a million people, the traffic was light and the pace was slow. We think it needs a bit of a spruce up, as there are a lot of classic looking buildings that could use a retouch. We liked the city, though, and Uruguay as a whole. Definitely worth going for a few days if you come to South America.

Montevideo has some interesting architecture, like this building:



which has an twin sister in Buenos Aires and is inspired by the numerology of Dante´s Divine Comedy, so the floors have either 22 or 33 rooms to them.

Uruguay´s most famous artist is Joaquín Torres Garcia. We visited the museum of his work in Montevideo and he has some cool stuff. You could also see some of his works reproduced as murals around town.



And finally, if you´re curious why I took to using the term "Orientals" in this post, it´s because Uruguay is officially known as "La República Oriental del Uruguay" and the people usually refer to themselves as "orientales" rather than "uruguayos". The "Oriental" part comes from when Uruguay was joined with Buenos Aires and Argentina and refers to the eastern (oriental) part of this federation.

I´ll have to confirm this somehow, but I also learned that Uruguay is supposedly the only country in the Americas that has no native population. I believe that to be true as Uruguay is fairly small and the population is very European.