The Obligatory Mate Post

No, not “mate” as in Aussie speak or your partner – it is pronounced MA-tay and is the official beverage of Uruguay and Argentina. Just as many people in the US walk around with Starbucks cups glued to their hands, you couldn’t throw your half caf decaf with a twist (anyone get the movie reference? Post a comment if you do) and not hit an Uruguayo with a mate gourd in his hand – that is if you could get your half caf decaf with a twist… more on the sorry coffee situation here in a later post. I’m still too depressed to write about that one.

Remy likes mate too.

So, back to mate: Mate is an herbal infusion made from the yerba mate plant, which grows in Paraguay, and drunk in huge quantities in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and parts of Brazil. It is an acquired taste. People unaccustomed to it describe it variously as grassy, like green tea, bitter or just plain awful. I happen to like it. The really cool and unusual thing about mate is that it is drunk from a gourd, not a cup, and you sip it through a metal straw called a bombilla. The bombilla is tapered at the end which goes into your mouth and the other end is spoon shaped with tiny holes to act as a sieve to keep the mate bits out of your mouth. Some uppity Argentines use tea bags instead, but that practice is met with scorn here.

Noah does not like mate.

My first experimentation with mate was not good. I did not realize there was a process one must follow to get drinkable mate. I ended up with a strongly bitter beverage and lots of powdery mate bits coming up through the straw. The result was quite unpleasant. Happily, I was inducted into the tradition of mate by true Uruguayos. Our dear friend Susana taught me that I must first soak the mate with cold water and push it down into the side of the gourd. Once it is good and packed, I then pour hot, not boiling water into the gourd. Once the straw is set in the packed mate, don’t move it or you will screw up the nice packing job you did when you poured in the cold water. From there, you can replenish the hot water whenever necessary. The mate can be used over and over again through out the day. There are all sorts of subtle variation on the process, and they are as individual as the drinker. I now have a fond memory of whiling away an hour before lunch sipping mate with Susana, her husband Jorge, Cesar and Tita, who showed me how to fill the gourd properly so as not to disturb the mate and how to pass it to my left to my friend. When the gourd made its way back to Tita, she would fill it, drink and pass it on. You can drink mate alone or with friends. Uruguayans are very sociable and usually a small group of friends will share a mate gourd.

Mate is every where here. At some gas stations you will even see vending machines that provide hot water for your thermos. Mate drinkers carry around thermoses (the preferred brand is Stanley) full of hot water so they can continually refill their gourds. Many people carry a specialized leather container just the right size for a thermos, bag of dry mate and the gourd. It is not uncommon to see people on mopeds, mate paraphernalia bag hanging from their shoulder and the mate gourd in one hand, leaving the other hand for the slightly less important job of steering the moped. The very adept mate drinkers can even hold the gourd with one hand and pour hot water from the thermos held under the armpit of the same arm, leaving their other arm completely free. If you see a lot of Uruguayos with burn marks on one hand, now you know why.

Snickers says "screw mate, I am an American cat, give me the tootsie pops!"

Murciélagos

Murciélagos is the Spanish word for bats. I estimate that we live with about a hundred of them, maybe more. That’s right, 1-0-0. Curious about our little winged furry friends, I sat down in a corner of the back porch at dusk and watched as the bats came out of the house to start their nocturnal bug gorging fest. I stopped counting at fifty because by then it was too dark for me to see. They popped out of the tiny entrance to their roost in groups of two or three. Then they swooped low to clear the roof of the porch and fluttered right over my head into the night sky.

This would be a good time to dispel some myths and misunderstandings about bats. First of all, they do not get tangled in your hair. I don’t know where this silly myth came from, but bats want nothing to do with your head. It may be their seemingly erratic flight patterns that brought about this myth. Secondly, though they can have rabies and other sorts of nasty pathogens, only half a percent of bats carry the disease. It is extremely rare for humans or domestic animals to get rabies from a bat. Another myth is that they suck blood. True, there are three species that feed on the blood of cattle or other animals, but they do not harm their host and they do not usually feed on humans. The three types that do feed on blood use their scalpel sharp teeth to make a tiny incision, then lap up the blood that flows out. Their saliva contains a special anticoagulant that keeps the blood flowing as long as they are feeding. A meal would be just a couple of teaspoons of blood. Finally, the expression “blind as a bat” notwithstanding, they are not blind. There are two orders of bats – megachiroptera and microchiroptera. The mega bats have large eyes and use their excellent eye sight to find fruit and flowers for pollen and nectar. The micro bats feed mainly on insects, and use echolocation to find their prey. Their eyesight is poorly developed, but they are not blind.

I have had several opportunities to observe them up close. Unfortunately, most of these were not good for the bat. One morning, I found a bat treading water in the dogs’ water bowl. I put on the leather gloves I always wear when handling the bats and wrapped it up in a washcloth and put it in a warm place in the laundry room until dusk. That night I released it. It seemed groggy at first, but flew off. That story had a happy ending. Others did not. There was the bat I found with torn wings – maybe a near miss by an owl. That one did not survive. Then there was the stiff as a board bat I found in the laundry room. It had crawled out of the wrong hole in the roof and got stuck in there and died, still hanging upside down on the wall.

Our bats are not the blood drinking sort; rather they consume probably thousands of insects a night. Mosquitoes here are bad enough even with the bats, I don’t want to think about what their numbers would be without their bat predators. For this reason, and because I think they are cute, and because of our live and let live attitude towards wildlife (which makes exceptions for any centipedes I find in the house) we let them be, even though they make noise all night and their guano stinks. Stinky droppings aside, they are clean animals, spending hours each day grooming themselves and their roost mates.

The Best Birthday Present - My New Butch Bike

As I mentioned in my first post about biking in Uruguay, to ride our road bikes, we must first pack them into the car and drive somewhere with paved roads. That small inconvenience aside, Uruguay presents many great biking opportunities, from coastal rides with fantastic sea views to rolling pasture on dirt roads with no cars in sight. My creamsicle-pearl-orange custom I.F. Factory Lightweight will always be my pride and joy – my main squeeze, I like to say – but since we have been here I have been jonesing for a mountain bike. So, for my birthday, I had a choice of motorcycle or horse as a present, but instead I confessed my desire for a mountain bike, and off to the Trek store we went.

Neither of us expected to find a quality bike shop here. But after noticing the many hard-core roadies hammering down the highways, we knew there had to be something. Trek’s store here, well located in an upscale area, is gleaming perfection inside. High end components are lacking, but they have a nice selection of Trek, Lemond and Gary Fisher bicycles. The service was top notch. I was pleasantly surprised by the thorough fitting I received by an extremely helpful Chilean racer named Claudio, fresh from his daily ride, still in bike shorts, jersey and bike shoes.

We came home later that day with a hard-tail Trek 4500 WSD, my first mountain bike. I had Cesar drop me off at the main road to our house so I could ride in. Riding a mountain bike is a different world from the road bike. For starters, I am not used to being so high up. Also, it is truly liberating to cruise over rough terrain or potholes without fear of damaging my bike. Bombing downhill on a gravel road is exhilarating. In all, a LOT of fun. For a while, I am going to be something of a sissy until I get used to this bike. I could use some pointers on just how to ride a mountain bike (comments, anyone?). Cesar’s only advice is “whatever happens, don’t stop”. Um, that helps…

Maybe we will still get a horse someday. I even have a name picked out for when we do. But for now it’s nice to have an aluminum horse that doesn’t eat and that I don’t have to saddle up before riding.

The Girls Next Door

Not one of the girls next door, this cow is free to roam up and down the lane, eating her fill of fresh grass.

Our only neighbors within a stone’s throw away are the cows on the lot next to us. The first night we spent in the house they mooed all night long. It seemed like some kind of bizarre cow welcoming party. Since then, we have either become used to their mournful calls, or they have become used to us and decided to give us some peace at night.

I have not exactly befriended the girls. When they see me coming, they either turn and amble away, or simply turn and stand there with their backsides towards me. Nevertheless, I feel something like affection towards them. That is why I was so distraught several days ago.

We are in a terrible drought. For nearly two months, not a drop has fallen from the sky. Our grass is now the color of straw and it crunches under foot when we walk through the yard. On the day I mentioned, I was particularly frustrated because the cows were oblivious to my attempts to be kind to them by providing clean fresh water. It was a hellishly hot day, not a cloud in the sky, and the brutal sun was scorching everything. The cows’ pond is quite low, though there is still enough muddy water to sustain them.

I thought the poor boney creatures would appreciate a large bin full of fresh water. However, my attempts to lead them to it were futile. I also tried spraying them with the hose, but a strong headwind simply blew the spray back in my direction. I got close enough to notice that one poor creature had walked through some loose fence wire and was trailing a large tangle of it behind her, part of it wrapped around her front legs as well. I grabbed from our tool box what I thought were a pair of wire cutters, and while deciding the best way to free the cow, tested them out and found them to be useless against the strong fence wire. In the end, I gave up for the day. Fortunately, the next day, someone else (the owner possibly? a vet?) came to visit the cows and removed the wire. I really wanted to talk to this person to find out who they were and why they were neglecting their animals, but my Spanish is still very poor. Rather than get into a pantomime confrontation, I kept my distance, rationalizing my timidity by telling myself a confrontation wouldn’t help anyway.

This photo may appear over-exposed, but it is not; that is actually the color of the grass now.

It is beyond me how people can be capable of such callousness to the suffering of animals. These are domestic animals; they are there because someone bought them and put them there. That means that person has a commitment to those animals and is responsible for their welfare. Leaving them on a plot of land barely able to provide enough vegetation and water is inexcusable. It is obvious the owners do not care about these animals. The dead cow is a prime example.

Just a couple of weeks after our arrival and before the drought had really set in, one of the cows died. Close to the fence, we noticed her lying on her side. Sleeping? No. That became the first of our two odd police reports concerning bovines. Unable to find the owner or anyone who knew the owner, we went to the rural police station to find out whether they knew the owner of the cows. No luck. It seems that when a cow is dead, and needs to be removed, the owners do not want to be located. So the carcass remained there and remains to this day. The prevailing winds come from the east of us, so we are upwind of the cow and only smelled it on the few times the winds came from the other direction. And it was foul. I think the carcass is so desiccated now that it does not have much odor anymore. Even the carrion eaters do not visit it now.

Hopefully there will not be future casualties. There are two young among the cows and they look so new and fresh and clean. I can only hope they will be better off than their parents. But I know that they too will experience the vicissitudes of climate during their lives.

Veterinary Visit

This morning I put on my goin'-to-the-vet clothes and did not bother to take a shower. We were taking the dogs to the vet for a routine check up and I knew that by the time we returned home I would be wearing puppy puke. I called it right. All three dogs barfed in the car.

Around town, there are many veterinarians. They are inexpensive and even make house calls. Today's office visit, which included vaccinations and anti-parasite pills, cost 200 pesos per dog. So, in total, we spent about $25. In Virginia, Pender veterinary would cost us $80 just to walk through the door.

Tip, doing her best "Flying Nun" impression. This photo was taken several weeks ago.

Fire

This is how things looked when we arrived:

But after nearly two months of drought, we now have this:



Okay, so that was an extreme comparison - photo hyperbole to make a point of just how dry it is here now. As if the lack of rain was not bad enough, conditions are just right for brush fires. By the way, the cow died of unknown causes other than drought, more on that in a later post.

Our personal experience with fire started out on a somewhat light note. As I wrote in my New Year's post, we started out the year playing firefighter in front of Gloria's house. That particular fire burned an area roughly 20 by 30 feet and we were able to get it under control before the real firefighters arrived.

Photo courtesy of Gloria.

That fire was nothing compared to the one now raging just down the street from her house. Fortunately it is a safe distance away. Others are not so fortunate though. Large swaths of hillside are engulfed in flames as I type this. The smoke is illuminated by the fires and looks like billowing red clouds against the night sky. It is rather scary, especially considering there are homes nearby. We do not know how it started. Firefighters have been working all day to try to contain it.

There have been fires in nearby departments as well. In Canelones, the department just to the east of Montevideo, a huge fire started last Thursday near the town of Villa Argentina. According to an article in El Pais on January 2, 2009, translated courtesy of UruguayDailyNews.com, 100 hectares burned there. Poor visibility due to smoke caused lengthy back-ups on the coastal highway and flames were as close as 20 meters to some houses.

As I type, the wind has picked up. I can hear it blowing outside. This is bad for the firefighters. I wish in vain that rain would accompany the wind, but the sky was perfectly clear today, not a cloud in sight.

A Falcon's First Flight

In my “Critters” post on November 30, 2008, I wrote about the falcons snatching barn swallows as they dove into their hideout in the eaves of the house. At least that is what I thought they were doing. Shortly after that posting, we noticed that the falcons were actually entering the eaves of the house. I thought they were going in there for an all they could eat barn swallow buffet, but that was before we noticed they were already carrying food, usually snakes they had caught. Then we started to hear the chirping. It was a new sound. We would hear the scraping of talons and crashing of wings as the falcon entered, then the chirping would begin. It sounded like babies begging for food. And indeed it was. Over the following weeks, the chirping at feeding times got louder and louder as the babies grew. Finally, on New Year’s Eve day, I was summoned to the back yard by Cesar. He always calls me whenever he finds some odd animal – or something too gross to pick up (that’s my job). He had noticed a bird on the ground that would not move as he approached. Perhaps there was something wrong with it. I immediately recognized it as the baby of the falcons. There was nothing wrong with it; it was just on its first voyage out of the nest and hadn’t quite gotten its wings yet. In the next couple of days we noticed another baby. We think there are only two, because we have only seen two falcon babies at a time, but the American Kestrel can have up to seven eggs in a clutch.

Baby falcon close-up

The American Kestrel has an incredible range, from Alaska all the way to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. It is also known as the sparrow hawk, because of its small size. Its scientific name, Falco sparverius, means "falcon of the sparrows." However, it is a member of the falcon family and is closely related to the Peregrine Falcon. The color on these birds is fantastic. With rufous back and tail, white speckled belly, dramatic black face markings and slate blue on its wings, it is the most colorful of the birds of prey. The American Kestrel nests in cavities not of their own making, like our house, and may return to the same nesting locations year after year.

The young falcons’ flying is improving each day. Their landings are still a little rough, but we can see improvement. I suspect their parents were living here before we came along. We enjoy sharing the house with them and hope they like it enough to stick around and maybe have next year’s young here.

Baby falcon in pine tree

On the Frontera

On a whim, we drove to Brazil today. We cannot officially visit Brazil until we get visas, but we got a very small taste of the Portuguese speaking nation to our north by visiting the border town of Chuy. We knew we were getting close when we saw the mandatory Aduana (Customs) stops we would have to come through on the way back, but did not realize we were in Brazil until we noticed the road signs were in Portuguese. Being border ignoring scofflaws was not our intent, so we quickly turned around headed into town.

Chuy (Chui in Brazil) has a reputation as being a rough place. Other than the dude I saw walking down the street with tattoos covering his face (sorry, I may be brave enough to chase a bull, but was not brave/stupid enough to ask this dude for his photo), we did not see the rough side of it. Let’s just leave it as saying it is cool to see once, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Most people go there for the duty free shopping. The main road through the center of town – one side Uruguay, the other, Brazil – is lined with duty free shops on the Uruguayan side. Prices seem pretty good – a 750ml bottle of Chivas was $25, and we saw Johnny Walker Blue Label for $150. We passed on the Scotch and purchased a bottle of Penfolds 2006 Koonunga Hill Shiraz, mainly because seeing an Australian wine here is such a novelty. We also bought some Frey Swiss chocolate, a hand-made hammock, and a dress for me. Eating lunch at a parilla we noticed that most of the patrons were speaking Portuguese. We were both hoping for some good Brazilian style black beans and rice (probably impossible to find on a menu in “Euro” Uruguay), but settled for a tortilla Espanola and chicken brochettes. The surprise of the day was running into an expat couple from Canada who we knew through http://www.uruguayliving.com/. I had met Gundy only once and knew her husband Syd only by his photograph, but recognized them walking down the street. What a small world it is. Then we slipped across the border again to take this photo of the Brazilian side:

Uruguayans are limited in the value of goods they are allowed to bring back from Chuy. However, with an American passport, Aduana does not even ask what we purchased. All I had to say to the Aduana official was “somos Americanos” and he waved us by with a friendly “muy bien” and a thumbs-up sign. Ah, I love my U.S. passport!

Bueller, Bueller....?

I know you're out there. You have been reading the blog, lurking. Come on people, give me some comments! Please? For the technologically challenged, you can submit comments by simply clicking "COMMENTS" at the bottom of each post.

I am happy to say I can now post photos. Thanks to a free download of Microsoft PowerToys, I can resize .jpg files so they can be easily uploaded. Some older posts have been updated with pictures.

¡Feliz 2009!

Today is only the first day of 2009, but it has been such a full day that I feel like it has been at least two days so far. First, we had a fantastic time with friends last night. As I have mentioned before in this blog, new friends here have welcomed us like family. Their warm and sincere hospitality gives me a sense of comfort in this far from home place. I am grateful for it.

After spending hours around the table enjoying good food, wine and conversation, we ushered in the New Year in the Uruguayan way – with besos all around and fireworks, naturally. Fireworks here are called “fuegos artificiales”, literally artificial fire. But soon we had real fire to deal with. All it took was one ember, and a large patch of dry vegetation by the front of the house was ablaze. The bomberos were called but we did not wait idly for them to come. With Cesar manning the hose, Neli with a bucket, and Marisa and I beating down flames with soaking green branches torn from Chilca bushes, we kept it contained. Dirty from smoke and soot, we called it a night around 1:30am. Nothing kills a party like a brush fire.

We did not get much sleep though, because we were determined to welcome the first rays of sun of 2009 on Playa Brava, in Punta del Este. Being married to the human alarm clock is really handy when one has to get up at 5:30am after three hours of sleep. On our way to the beach, we passed huge crowds of revelers just leaving the clubs after partying the night away. Sleepy-eyed, we rendezvoused at the beach with Gloria and friends and took in the warmth and energy of the rising sun. I had the fleeting but powerful feeling of rejuvenation; like this was not just another sunrise, but the start of something new.
Back at the chacra, we made a big American style breakfast complete with home-made biscuits, before trying to catch up on sleep. Before we knew it, it was mid-day and time to go back to Gloria’s house. None of us got enough of last night, so we gathered around the outside table one more time for a lunch of turkey, roast pork, arugula salad, caprese, stuffing, green beans almandine and of course, wine. Satiated, we wiled away the rest of the afternoon, either playing cards, napping, exploring the garden, or just relaxing.

From chasing a bull to putting out a fire, to soaking in the first rays of sun, it has been a pretty exciting couple of days. Here is to 2009 – may it be filled with peace and happiness for all.