Brasília, Brazil
I’ll be honest, I didn’t have high expectations for Brasilia. It’s a planned city, built from scratch in the 1960s, and most people told me it was sterile, boring, and only worth visiting if you had a game there. They were wrong. Brasilia turned out to be one of the best stops of the entire trip, and it was almost entirely because of the people.
It started with a stadium match — Switzerland versus Ecuador — which was a solid game and a great way to settle in. But the real magic of Brasilia happened outside the stadium. Through the hostel and various World Cup gatherings, I fell in with a group of locals who essentially adopted me for the duration of my stay. Regina, Carol, Yuri, Virgilio, Luiza and the rest of the gang became my crew, and they made sure I experienced the city like a local rather than a tourist.
Yuri in particular was an absolute legend. One day he invited me over to his place to watch the Australia versus Netherlands match, which was significant because Tim Cahill scored one of the greatest goals in World Cup history — that ridiculous left-foot volley that seemed to hang in the air for about three seconds before crashing into the net. Watching that goal surrounded by Brazilians who were going just as mental as I was, eating homemade stroganoff and hotdogs, drinking coffee, and meeting Yuri’s parents — it felt more like being at a family gathering than watching football with people I’d met days earlier. That’s Brazil for you.
The stadium experiences kept coming. I saw Colombia versus Ivory Coast, which was entertaining, and then the big one: Brazil versus Cameroon. The atmosphere for a Brazil game at the World Cup, in Brazil, is something I genuinely struggle to put into words. The entire stadium was a wall of yellow, the noise was deafening, and every touch of the ball by a Brazilian player was met with a reaction you could feel in your chest. Fucking amazing doesn’t quite cover it, but it’s the closest I can get.
Between games, life in Brasilia settled into a brilliant rhythm. Maria hosted a churrasco at her place where we watched Brazil versus Mexico. There were nights at bars and nightclubs around the city, shisha and kebabs with Yuri, acai runs, and long afternoons watching games at various spots around town. We watched Argentina versus Switzerland at Pontao, caught the USA game at Pier 21, and spent quieter evenings at the apartment just hanging out and exploring the city.
I spent a fair bit of time with Luiza and the gang, who were great company throughout. We cooked curry one night, got dessert at a French place, then went sightseeing around the city at night. Brasilia’s architecture is genuinely striking after dark — all those Niemeyer buildings lit up, the wide open spaces, the reflection off the lake. It’s a strange and beautiful city when you actually stop to look at it.
The last few days were a mix of more football (Portugal versus Ghana, Argentina versus Belgium), a Japanese dinner with the gang, and a trip to ParkShopping to pick up some bits and pieces. I walked around the lake one evening and just took it all in, knowing I’d be leaving soon.
Leaving Brasilia for Sao Paulo was harder than I expected. The city I’d written off as a boring bureaucratic capital had become the heart of my World Cup experience. The matches were incredible, but it was the friendships that made it special — being welcomed into people’s homes, sharing meals, watching football together as though we’d known each other for years rather than days. That’s the kind of thing you can’t plan for. You just have to show up and let it happen.