German bread, wheat beer and other cultural and culinarial experiences as German faraway from Germany

 Hi everybody. Thanks for Your respective questions and concerns. I am fine and had just taken a post free day yesterday because of my really arduous agenda during the last couple of days. 

On wednesday evening I participated until 11pm in an online conference with our colleagues in Singapore, on thursday morning I participated from 5:30am on in the online meeting of the VDMA Mining Steering Committee Asia together with many colleagues and friends from other German mining industry suppliers. Our host has been this time the VDMA India. Directly after this event I participated in an online event of the Competence Center for Mining and Mineral Resources of the AHK Peru and in the afternoon we had a 4 hours online training event for all Vulkan do Brasil sales managers together with external consultants. And in the evening I had another online conference with my colleagues in Singapore and directly after this an online conference with my colleagues in Australia. 

Due to this challenging and exhausting conference program and because of my normal weekly follow up conferences during the whole friday with all my Brazilian management team colleagues, I just decided to skip doing my post yesterday. 

But now we`re already on the wonderful weekend and I can write my today`s post calmly enjoying a wonderful German wheat beer and listening to my favorite German streaming radio station (radio.de)  "Antenne München". 

And this leads me directly to the subject of my today`s post. During all the time since I left Germany in June 1997 for living and working abroad - always as General Manager for excelent, market and technology leading German industrial companies - many people have been asking me, whether I had not become homesick and what I was missing most of Germany since I had moved away from there.

First of all I can frankly admit, that I continue uninterruptedly as a fan and admirer of Germany and many things - but not all -  there. But as I love to live faraway from where I was born and had grown up, I have never really felt homesick for a single second. I love very much all the countries and places where I have been living during these meanwhile more than 20 years and I did never regret my decision to develop my live and professional career in this way.

But due to the fact, that I have always been working for German companies, I have during all this time always had the nice opportunity to travel to Germany for business reasons for normally 2-3 times every year. And apart these business trips to Germany I have normally also travelled 1-2 times for purely private reasons to Germany every year for visiting familly members and friends or for spending holidays there together with my lovely wife and our 2 wonderful sons. 

Thus I have never really lost contact with Germany and I also read continuously several German newspapers and journals online. But I don´t watch German TV or German movies and I hardly read German books. 

And for sure I have a lot of German friends, colleagues and other business partners, with which I am very frequently in contact and with which I also quite frequently exchange information and opinion about what is going on in Germany and Europe, which during the last 20 years has almost gained the same importance for me as Germany itself.

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Coming back to the question, which of the things, which can be regarded as typically German, I have been missing at the different places in Brazil, Mexico and Spain where I have been living since 1997. This question is quite easy for me to answer. The practically only two things which I have been missing since the beginning of my life abroad have been the German bread and the German wheat beer. 

When it comes to bread, things get really complicated. Nor in Spain nor in Mexico I had the luck to find good German bread. It`s just not available there and does not fit into the food cultures of the people there. In Sao Paulo You can quite easily find German bakeries of often really impressively good quality. But even if they have good bread, they never can offer You the great variety of different bread choices, which You will find in any bakery at any place in Germany. 

And for sure, if You do not live in Sao Paulo city or in one of the regions in the south of this beautiful country, where the Germans have still strong populational and cultural importance, You will have great difficulties to find really good "German" bread in Brazil. 

With regards to German style wheat beer (like f.e. Erdinger, Paulaner, Franziskaner and all other famous brands) things have become extremely easy, but continue quite expensive. When I arrived at Mexico in June 2003, wheat beer was extremely difficult to find there because the Mexicans prefer totally different beer types. This was definitely different, when I moved back to Brazil at the end of 2009. Besides the lots of Germans and decendants of Germans, which can You find in great parts of Brazil, even more and more Brazilians like wheat beer. But for sure, all original beers imported from Germany are normally very expensive. You must pay 3-4 times the prize for a common Brazilian mass beer if You want to buy an imported German bottle. 

During the last years the Brazilians have discovered their appreciation for craft beers and You can find these and the small local breweries now easily everywhere in this country. And many of these craft beer breweries offer wheat beer of different quality - compared to the German wheat beers - within their offer of several different beer types. My - German & Brazilian - friends here where I live and I love very much a local craft wheat beer from a small but very nice brewery (http://www.cervejariahebling.com.br/) in the neighborhood village of the small town Vinhedo, where we live close to the city of Campinas and approximately 70km away from Sao Paulo city. 

The idea, to share these cultural and culinarial experiences and opinions with You arose this morning, when my wife and I went for the first time to a recently opened new supermarket in our town. While my wife was looking up the offer and prizes for groceries, I had immediately walked to the beverage shelfes. For my great surprise and happiness, I discovered that this supermarket had a special prize offer for original imported German Paulaner wheat beer. The prize was half the normal one and thus this beer was really offered at an attractive bargain prize. I immediately informed all my management team members and my complete circle of friends in Vinhedo in whatsapp about this wonderful opportunity and collected their orders and now I waiting for them to drop into my house for having a nice beer with me and for picking up their boxes. I love to make other people happy. Their fun becomes automatically my fun. 

On the picture above in the lower left corner You can see me and our son Geywison 15 years ago, when we lived at Toluca, Mexico, in 2600 meters above sea level. During that time I was Managing Director of the German autoparts supplier ElringKlinger`s mexican company and factory. We took the picture after I had purchased the complete remaining (expensive) stock of original imported German Franziskaner wheat beer in a supermarket there. The hint, that this supermarket offered this delicious German wheat beer on that saturday had been given to me by a good German friend, who lived close to me and who was working as Sales Director for Mercedes Benz`s bus division in Mexico. It`s really good and important to have trustful and reliable friends in life. 

I hope that this was interesting for You and I am really looking forward to Your comments and experience sharing about German bread and wheat beers. 

Enjoy the wonderful weekend. See You again on monday for my next post here in my blog.