Argentine Tea (actually, it's unofficial name is Paraguayan Tea, not Argentine, but this is my world)

The first time I remember hearing of Belen was when my mother told me that she was sure the latest Rotary Exchange student living at our house was on some kind of previously-unheard of Latin American drug.

I was in Kingston at the time, more concerned with braving the Arctic Blast and how long it would take before our resident Dish Nazi chastised me for leaving my dishes in the sink, so I didn't pay a lot of attention. As far as I recall, by the time I went home for the Christmas holidays and met Belen she had finished all the yerba she'd brought with her, so I was never treated to the sight of her pattering around our house clutching her mate with its silver bombilla, overflowing with grubby herbs. That old mate (mah-tay) still has a place of honour in our kitchen cupboard - the one where Mom crams all the stuff we don't use.

Like the rest of my family, I am also pretty convinced that there's not much wrong in the world that a cup of tea won't set to rights. Studies have been done that show the very ritual of making tea can soothe you - the familiar routine of putting the kettle on the burner, the straining of the leaves, the stirring of milk and sugar - or not, depending on the type of tea you're drinking. In the cold and dark of those winter mornings before Squad the cup of tea my mother would make for me would be the only reason in the entire universe to get out of bed. My father makes it for my mother on weekend mornings, my sister and I make it together on Hangover Sundays, and we make vats of it when there's a football game on and our TV room is crowded with the usual football gang - who all sip it elegantly and rest their cups daintily on their saucers to cheer when someone scores a goal. Yell, "Who wants tea?" from our kitchen at any point on any given day and you're almost certain to hear an affirmative hollered back from some corner of the house.

My grandfather used to take it only with condensed milk, and we would imitate him, feeling we were partaking in something slightly magical. A ritual that extended far beyond us - the idea that he took his tea like that during the war years, a reality that for us had only ever taken place in books, would provide endless fodder for the imagination.

And, of course, you make it with friends. It's the reason for field trips, a temporary escape from That Place with certain skank-ass b's or crazy fools, for a good goss on the way to and from the gas station. It's the most wonderful present you could ever receive when someone brings it for you in That Place, and the most devastating thing in the world when someone goes on a tea run and you don't get your order in. There's something nurturing about tea - it's what you do for a girlfriend when the latest guy has trampled over her heart (god, men). What you make when someone's feeling down. What you do when someone comes over and you just want an excuse to sit and put the world to rights with them.

Enter the ritual of mate. Take how the English feel about tea, multiply it by perhaps a thousand times, and you've got how Argentines feel about mate.

Yerba mate is a dried chopped leaf that's somehow related to the holly plant and bears an intriguing resemblance to marijuana (hence my mother's aforementioned but unfounded concern about Belen's non-stop consumption of it).

Now, mates themselves - the containers that you drink the drink from - can range from plastic Boca Juniors products to silver and gem-plated treasures. The most basic and most common that you see, however, is just a gourd, about cup-sized, usually in a silver cradle of some sort so you can rest it on a table. The gourd is hollowed out, and you fill it to perhaps halfway or a bit further with the dried leaf. Also in the gourd you place the bombilla - a metal straw, usually silver, with a bulbous end that filters the leaves so that only the liquid travels through the straw.

You pour the water near the bombilla, slowly, so that it creates a small froth, and fill the mate. Then, well, suck away. (Oh, if I had a peso ...)

The ritual is such that, despite the countless restaurants we went to in Buenos Aires, we never once saw it on a menu. Almost the entire point of mate is sharing and talking. You sit in a circle, and the cebador, the person pouring the water, usually passes the gourd clockwise. When it's your turn you sip until all the water is gone, then pass it back to the cebador, who refills it with water and passes it on to the next.

Mate "provokes a gentle perspiration, improves the appetite, speedily counteracts the languor arising from the burning climate, and assuages both hunger and thirst," one Jesuit wrote ages ago. On Sundays walking down the Costanera in Rosario you see hundreds of young people gathering to take mate together and pass time, checking each other out and watching the boats on the river. Belen and her friends gather around the table, cigarettes lit, to gossip with the mate. In some regions they add sugar, in others they take it amargo. Maria adds bits of orange peel to hers as she watches the Argentine version of "the story" - Amor en Custodia. The brooding, melodramatic stars of Amor en Custodia stare pensively and darkly into space while drinking their mate. The kiosco owners take it while reading the newspapers they are selling. Old men sit on park benches and argue passionately while sharing the mate, refilling the gourd with water hot from a thermos. Every Argentine you meet has a thermos, in public places vendors wheel carts overflowing with thermoses of hot water around, while others cart their thermoses under their arms. Take your empty thermos just about anywhere and ask them to heat water for you, they'll do it.

When Belen finally convinced my mother that she wasn't on drugs and talked her into trying it, my mother apparently made such a face that Belen still likes to imitate it, three years later. I won't lie, the shit looks disgusting. And on the first taste the bombilla is too hot, the liquid is too hot and bitter, and you have to wonder what the heck all the fuss is. That's what we three thought back in Buenos Aires when we tried it for the first time with IG's mate.

But, especially if you're used to herbal teas, it grows on you pretty quickly. Like tea, it's hard to say whether it's the taste or the ritual itself that becomes so addictive, but one thing's for sure - I get it now.

And I really hope Matty F is working at the Airport again when I come back home, cuz I'm pretty sure our diligent Customs Officials will have plenty to say if I come home from South America armed with heavy packages of what looks like a mind-boggling amount of marijuana and try to explain to them that it's yerba mate.