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Argentinian Tea Culture
Argentina is the largest exporter of tea to the US, and the largest producer of tea in the Western hemisphere.
Argentine tea culture is the culture of "Yerba Mate". Yerba mate was first introduced to me by an Argentine graduate student in the US. I never saw him without an unusual but attractive contraption that looked like a sippy cup for adults. Inside the device was a very large amount of green herbal leaves. Yerba mate comes from a plant from the holly family that grows in and around northern Argentina. Argentines put ground up, dried, green Yerba mate into a hollowed out gourd called a calabash or in a manufactured calabash-like container, and drink the yerba mate through a "bombilla", which is a metal straw with a bulbous wire mesh on the end. The wire mesh keeps the swollen Yerba mate leaf fragments from passing through the straw.
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