As part of our Master’s of International Business program we are able to choose a regional specialization. The students who chose Latin America had a course excursion to Brazil for two weeks. Our trip started early in the morning on the 26th of October, 2014 and after 24 hours of travelling, including three flights and a short bus ride, we arrived at our first stop, Blumenau. Blumenau was founded by a German immigrant, Dr. Hermann Bruno Otto Blumenau. The German influence is still visible in the architecture as well as in the traditional beer breweries. Blumenau was a nice start to our excursion because there are still residents who speak German, their Octoberfest was still going on while we were there, the weather was nice and we were able to enjoy our hotel pool. In Blumenau, we visited a famous glass manufacturer, had lectures at the local university, enjoyed a tasting at a beer brewery and visited Hering, a well-known Brazilian textile company, which was also founded by a German.
The founder of Blumenau
After Blumenau we traveled on to Florianopolis, which is the capital of the state Santa Catarina and composed of one main island, a continental part and some smaller, surrounding islands. In Florianopolis we learned more about the Cachaça production (the main ingredient of Caipirinha), tried oyesters, visited the government funded innovation park Sapiens Parque and an otter farm. In addition, we also had a day of free time to enjoy the nice weather and the beautiful beaches of Florianopolis. Florianopolis was, apart from our trip to Rio de Janeiro, the most fun and interesting city for me.
After a relatively short flight, we reached our third destination, Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. Brasilia is a planned city and is supposed to have the shape of an airplane. However, with additional growth and construction since the foundation of the city, the plane shape is not really visible any longer. In Brasilia we had a sight-seeing tour, where we actually saw the current president Dilma Rousseff arrive by helicopter to her official home. Additionally, thanks to our fellow student Daniel, we were able to visit the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade because he used to work there. This visit was particularly interesting because we learned more about what drives the Brazilian economy. Our time in Brasilia concluded with a visit to the Banco do Brazil, one of the largest financial institutions in Latin America with more than 61.4 million clients. There, we learned how advanced and safe the Brazilian financial system is. After that we flew to Sao Paulo, the last stop of our official excursion.
In Sao Paulo, we had a tour of the stock exchange, which was my favorite part of the entire excursion. We had a short presentation given by Fabio Iwabe, who is a really great lecturer and managed to explain Brazil’s financial market in a very quick and easily understandable way. We also had a company visit in Sao Paulo to Natura, a famous Brazilian cosmetics company that strongly emphasizes the naturalness of its products. Unfortunately for all the girls, you can only buy their products from agents, similar to the Tupperware concept.
Our second day in Sao Paulo was purely dedicated to lectures with our professor Paulo Salvador and some guest lecturers, including two Brazilian brothers who import German beer. It was interesting to see how complicated it is to import German beer or get a license to actually sell it.
View of Rio
The final day of the official excursion was a visit to the Volkswagen production site in Sao Paulo. This visit was very important to all of us because the majority of our grade for this semester is a case study involving car manufacturers in Brazil. Therefore, we had a lot of questions and it was great first-hand experience for us. The majority of us decided to use the ‘free’ weekend before classes start again to fly to Rio de Janeiro, since visiting this city wasn’t part of the excursion and we all wanted to see it.
Cristo Redentor
Rio de Janeiro was great! We stayed right by the beach and visited the Cristo Redentor. Even though we only had 48 hours in Rio, we made the most of it and enjoyed Ipanema beach and the great atmosphere.
My main take-away from this trip is that Brazil is a great but very diverse country. I enjoyed the trip very much and I am very thankful for the great opportunity, but after two weeks of traveling I was also happy to get back home to Frankfurt. Brazil is still developing and has great potential, but the beaches and the Caipirinhas are without a doubt already great.
And here is a short video from our trip!
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