He has, admittedly, quite an idealistic vision of what his journey might look like. El Manawy pictures walking into a diner, clad in a Belgium jersey, carrying a soccer ball, basically looking for interaction. He hopes someone will recognize the red of the kit, or at least want to kick a ball about. That, he claims, will be a conversation starter – and then he\u2019s off to the races. <\/p>\n
\u201cI’m gonna enter the diner with my Belgium jersey with a football, and I’ll just try to organize games, you know, in a very spontaneous way with just random people, so everywhere I’ll stop. That would be my main goal,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
There are, of course, some caveats here. America is a big country, and there are places with very few people – and perhaps not loads of soccer fans. But those parts of the trip tend to be El Manawy\u2019s favorite. That\u2019s when the real stories are told. <\/p>\n
\u201cI will be driving up north, and in the northern part of the country, don’t have lots of host cities, especially in the middle, like Montana, and everything, but that\u2019s going to be interesting,\u201d El Manawy said. <\/p>\n
He is also putting a certain amount of trust in the kindness of a day-to-day person in a country that is a little bit divided at the moment. But El Manawy has never had any problems before – and he doesn\u2019t anticipate many now. <\/p>\n
El Manawy will document his journey, too, covering his coast-to-coast travels on both Instagram and YouTube. He did the same in Qatar and hopes that these travels, too, will yield some compelling content.<\/p>\n
There is also the question of money. Should Belgium stick around in the tournament, this thing could get expensive. El Manawy brushed off that question and pointed out that, as a last resort, he has some generous friends and family in the States, if needs be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He has, admittedly, quite an idealistic vision of what his journey might look like. El Manawy pictures walking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[4365,7,1379,1849],"class_list":["post-18959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-belgium","tag-analysis","tag-belgium","tag-features","tag-world-cup"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116688495948427651","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}