This was originally published on my old blog BackpackBook (Livro de Mochila), a project that blended literature and travel, sometimes just traveling in my lucid dreams. It ran as “Witmarsum” on May 6, 2011.
To give ourselves a reason to travel, we decided to make one of those silly bets we always make. This time it was to find out… to find out what, again?
What do you call somebody born in Witmarsum?
We got so excited about what we’d find in that town that we never even thought about a prize for the winner, mostly because the suggestions were fairly outlandish. Except for Chikão’s bet, which we later discovered was “coincidentally” the same answer Wikipedia gives. As he put it himself, the internet isn’t everything 😀
At the start it looked like it would be a disaster, getting up at five in the morning and traveling almost 300 km to settle a bet. Then the things that went wrong made the trip a lot of fun.
The Mennonites fled the town
We turned up a few curiosities about the place, including that the original colonists of the Witmarsum in Santa Catarina (Brazil), German and Russian Mennonites, decided to buy land in Paraná and found a new Witmarsum, called Colônia Witmarsum. There’s a documentary that covers some of that history and a theory about why they moved.