The one thing you should do every time you visit a new country
Everyone travels for a different reason. Where some people are looking for an opportunity to explore the worlds, others are simply seeking a chance to sit back, relax and forget about life’s little worries (if only just for a moment).
Whatever your reason for heading overseas, and whatever type of holiday you have planned, there are measures you can take to make sure you truly get an immersive experience.
Writing for The Guardian, travel expert Pico Iyer suggests the only way to truly get a sense of the place you’re visiting when overseas, is to attend a local sporting event.
“My trick is to seek out sporting events wherever I go – baseball in Japan, football in Rio, takraw (kick volleyball) in Laos,” writes Iyer.
“The ball communicates in every language, you get to see the locals in a rare state of openness and passion, and you meet the culture in its most convivial and gregarious mode, when it is most ready to include an outsider in its rites (so long as he's wearing the right colours).”
“Plus, of course, the beauty of travel is that even when things go completely wrong, you end up in the right place. My first time in Japan, I took myself to a baseball game and deliberately showed up at 5pm for a game that I thought began at 7pm. I arrived to find great crowds streaming past me in the opposite direction, since the game had in fact begun at 2pm that day. But a stadium official was so heart-stricken to see me alone and walking in the wrong direction that he took me out to dinner, gave me a free ticket for the next day's game and, somehow, opened a door on the culture that would have stayed firmly closed if things had gone according to plan.”
So, there you have it! Have you ever attended a sporting event overseas?