Tweet30-07-2010 om 08:48 by Sueli Brodin

My mother-in-law had a hard time following me last Sunday as I explained how I had found out about the ice-cream parlour in the hamlet of Nattenhoven. I first had to tell her about the online social platform Twitter, where one can start getting followed by people one doesn’t necessarily know.

“Yes, it can sound a bit strange at first, but there’s a purpose to it, really...”

I went on explaining that one of my new followers was an account called “Cameta IJsterras” and that I had been most pleasantly surprised to discover that it was an ice-cream parlour near the town of Berg aan de Maas owned by a Dutch-Brazilian couple.

I have a natural and instinctive attraction for mixed couples, no matter their nationalities, but the prospect of meeting someone from my country of birth and speaking Portuguese made me even more eager to go and pay a visit to Cameta IJsterras.

I managed to convince everyone that it wasn’t going to rain that afternoon and that my mother-in-law who was spending the weekend with us and my three children would easily be able to bike the 15 km route on the dike along the Juliana Canal to Nattenhoven.









The narrow path on the dike is completely flat and very easy to bike. We crossed the bridge in Stein and continued our way on the other side of the canal.





It took us about one hour and half to arrive in Berg aan de Maas, which turned out to be a very picturesque town, with many old houses and cobblestoned streets. By that time, my youngest daughter announced that she was ready for her ice-cream.





Cameta IJsterras can hardly be missed: where else around here can we see a Brazilian flag floating side by side the Dutch flag?





We entered a cosy and welcoming courtyard, adorned with a small palm tree and a multitude of colourful wooden parrots on the walls.



As soon as I saw her, I addressed the Brazilian owner in Portuguese: “Você è Brasileira? Eu sou Brasileira também!”



As she served us the tastiest ice-cream coupes we’ve had in ages, Marlene told me that she and her Dutch husband had opened the parlour seven years ago and named it after the city she came from, Cametá, in the northern state of Pará in the Amazon region.

My mother-in-law had never seen me speak Portuguese and was astonished to hear Marlene and I babbling together like two good old friends.



The ice-cream parlour is open six months a year, from May till October, and every winter Marlene goes back to Brasil and spends two months with her family, para matar a saudade (literally to kill the yearning). It’s there that she buys her beautiful wooden parrots and her reserve of Brazilian flags, which sadly enough often get stolen.



Marlene and I were happy to find ourselves a common Brazilian friend in Maastricht, and chatted about life in the Netherlands ("good"), the weather ("one can’t complain about the summer so far"), the landscape ("there are many nice walks to make in the area around Nattenhoven!"), the people ("no one can compete with Brazilians"), the language (sigh). Marlene made me laugh when she told me that her mother calls her papagaio velho (old parrot), who can’t learn a new language anymore.



“Please come back and visit me again soon,” Marlene said when we left, “it is rare that I get to meet someone from Brazil around here and it makes me so happy to speak my own language..”



Later that day, I looked for information about Cametá on the internet because I wanted to visualise the place Marlene came from and the town she had named her ice-cream parlour after.

When Cametá showed up on the Google satellite map, I found myself staring at my computer screen for a long time in silence, overwhelmed by the dark green colours of Amazon rainforest and the mighty size of the many-branched Tocantins River flowing past the red-earthed city.

I learned that the names of Cametá and Tocantins both originated from the indigenous language of the Tupi people who used to inhabit the area.

The same Tupi people whose practise of ritual cannibalism inspired the Brazilian poet Oswaldo de Andrade to proclaim his famous Manifesto Antropófago in 1928, in which he argued that Brazil's history of "cannibalising" other cultures was its greatest strength. “Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question,” he joked, cannibalising Shakespeare’s famous quote.

Thinking further, it seems to me that Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto also applies to the globalised world we live in now, where previously distinct cultures increasingly get exposed to one another and start mixing and recreating themselves, strengthening and enriching one another in the process, for everyone’s benefit. It is happening in many walks of life and business sectors, much thanks to the spirit of sharing facilitated by social media platforms such as Twitter.

And it all explains why we can enjoy an authentic Coupe Copacabana at Cameta IJsterras in the small Dutch hamlet of Nattenhoven.

Comments

Leave a reply