July 31, 2009
How could soccer players be such ridiculously bad travelers?
What does it mean to be a good traveler? This is perhaps not unlike the question about what it means to be well-traveled we asked a long time ago.
I meant to blog about this in 2006. I'm going to link to an old article in a bit but first I want you to guess where Djibril Cisse, a soccer player on the French national team is talking about:
"There was nothing to do there," confessed striker Djibril Cisse. "We hung out inside the hotel just waiting for the next day, for the next match. Going downtown was out of question."
Here's a little hint. When I took a friend of mine from New York here in 2006 he said that they should call this city the one that never sleeps. He said New York City doesn't deserve the nickname because in this other city at 5:00 AM the bars and clubs are still open and people are still out drinking. To be fair by 6:00 or 7:00 some of those people are passed out on the sidewalk (or sometimes even the street):
So the answer. The French team was bored in Seoul during the 2002 World Cup. Keep in mind that Seoul is a city of 13 million people or so I'm told.
Who do you blame when you're bored in Seoul?
To make things worse, Seoul was not the place they would have chosen to stay.I bring this up because I don't understand how you could commit such a huge travel folly. How do you travel somewhere for the first time and then turn your hotel room into a bunker and cry about boredom? How do you not by a guidebook or hire a tour guide (I hear those European soccer players have the money)? How do you not find something to do? Posted by James Trotta at July 31, 2009 2:16 PMTheir luxurious five-star hotel on a hill from where you could see the Han River swiftly became a kind of bunker....They stayed by themselves and started to get bored.
