As I told you in my first post, I work in Industrial Marketing for a Catalan company exporting more than 95% of the turnover. This means, that whether for attending to exhibitions or visiting our agents or customers, sometimes I have to travel, and I must confess that I love it!
Wherever I go, I take with me a card explaining the celiac disease in the language of the country. You can do this with Google Translator, asking for it to the Celiac Association of that country or online platforms such as forums or from Celicity.
Usually, I also contact the hotel before booking, in order to inform them about my allergies and make sure they would have something gluten free prepared for the breakfast buffet. If they can offer me gluten free breakfast I book, if not I look for another one. In this case, they already had gluten free food so I booked. I even asked for a specefic type of bread and they bought it. It was perfect!
So, in may 2014 I went to an exhibition in Germany for 8 days. After going to the hotel, the first thing I did was asking Celicity for a supermarket to buy some gluten free food. There you can find gluten free food into DM, Edeka or Rewe, all of them big chains with different gluten free brands, even their own private label. I bought some cookies and bread because during the exhibitions we are so focused on attending to our visitors that we don’t even have time for lunch. Then of course, we have a great dinner!!
The second day, one of the visitors came from India and he was celiac. When one of my colleagues offered him a coffee and some cookies, he declined the cookies explaining he had to eat gluten free, so my colleague told me the situation and I brought the three packs of cookies I had left so he could choose… the problems was he understood that I was giving all of them to him, and he took them all and… I ran out of cookies!! Of course I didn’t feel bad, at the end between celiacs must help each other, especially when we are abroad. I just bought more cookies and problem solved!
Along the other days, we went to different german restaurants. Some of them I could choose, some others not, but thanks to one of my colleagues who speaks german I could clarify all doubts to the waiters and eat properly. The only day I couldn’t eat the same was in a brewery, when I had to eat duck, instead of Eisbein.
As you can see, celiacs are everywhere, even in Germany coming from India, and most of times we can eat the same than non celiacs, we just have to ask for it to be cooked separately and explain the waiter about the importance of taking care of crossed contamination.
We are expecting your comments telling us your gluten free experiences abroad!
