The Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence

Dutch footballer Boudewijn Zenden has played in half the positions on the field and for clubs in four countries. Born in Maastricht in the Netherlands, he started his career with PSV Eindhoven but left his home country aged 21. Eleven years later he has played for Barcelona, Chelsea, Middlesbrough, Liverpool and Olympique Marseilles. He is currently negotiating a move to a new club and lives in Aix-en-Provence, France.

In general there are three places here where the players live: Marseilles, Cassis and Aix-en-Provence. Cassis is on the beach, a fantastic place to live – but in summer it’s packed with tourists and in winter it’s quite quiet. Marseilles is a bit more hectic and Aix-en-Provence is quieter. In Aix there are other well-known people and they get left alone.

We can’t complain here. The weather is beautiful. Aix is quite young – a bit of a student town – with restaurants, bars and cafés and lots of shops. It is a bit of a drive to work: from Aix you have to count on 35 minutes to the [football] club.

Maastricht, my hometown, has a relaxed culture. They call it “the Maastricht quarter hour”: if you arrange to meet at five o’clock you can expect they’ll only show up at 5.15. If you don’t get out of your own city, I think you believe that what’s happening there is the best. Abroad people say: “The Dutch; they always know better.” When the manager says “We’ll go left” there’s always a Dutch player to say “Why do we go left?” A Dutchman always asks why. Whereas an Italian manager says to an Italian player “We’ll go left” and they go left.

In Barcelona you become a bit of a Catalan. The city has everything: the climate, the old town centre, the biggest football club. It’s easy to go along with the lifestyle. But you can also go to Barcelona and make nothing of it. If you want to find something negative, you will.

Then I was in London, a nice club in a classic city. Lots of celebrities live in London and people there generally leave a footballer in peace, so you can go around town quite anonymously. People there are fanatical about football but they are brought up to be more polite . They ask nicely if they can have an autograph. In southern Europe it’s more direct.

You try and succeed abroad; it’s not so easy. If someone tries and it doesn’t work out I say: “Well done, you took a chance and even if you only stay a year at least you still had an experience.” If you go back home and you’re at a club and you see a foreign guy coming in you can put yourself in his place and say “Oh, it’s not as easy as I thought it was. Maybe I will tap him on the back and ask him to go for dinner with the boys.”

Sometimes people say we footballers have changed but often it’s the view of the other person that has changed. Someone looks at you as a footballer, whereas you think “I’m absolutely myself”.

It’s always fun if you can combine the two: have a good club in a nice village. Obviously Middlesbrough wasn’t a village but I immediately enjoyed myself. That’s the other thing that people sometimes mistake: [they think] as long as you play on Saturday you’re happy anyway.

You could call it the thread that runs through my career, that I can adjust quite well. I think if you go abroad you have to try to adapt. I remember there was a Spanish player in Liverpool: all the food he got came from Spain, he only had Spanish TV, his family wasn’t happy because it was raining. If you look at all the negatives and you try to keep a hold on what you had before it’s never going to work. He ended up going back.

We players come into work in the mornings, we are among people, but for the family it’s not easy. They don’t speak the language, they don’t have friends, they are more on their own than we are. We have a goal.

You do fall in love with a place. But as long as I’m a footballer I have in the back of my head that I’m living like a nomad. You attach yourself to a place knowing there can be a moment when you move on.

I don’t think I can complain about the experiences I’ve had, the things I’ve seen, the prizes I’ve won. But you never really stop to think about it. Maybe that’s a footballer’s thing: you’re always busy with today.

In football you make a lot of acquaintances. I think that with some guys you have to accept that you don’t see each other after you leave the club. There’s a bunch of guys I still have regular contact with.

You can go to the end of the earth and if you think you’re alone there’ll always be another Hollander who has also decided to go to the end of the earth. If you’re on a skiing holiday, sitting on a terrace, and you see people taking sandwiches out of their bags they’re probably Hollanders.

At my age, 32, the step some people make to go and play in the desert, I think is still too early for me. And it has to be the right moment to go back to the Netherlands. I have to feel “I’ve seen so much abroad that I’ll happily go home now.” But maybe it would attract me to play for Fiorentina in Florence, another fantastic club. At a certain point you wonder: “Where do I feel at home?” I feel at home where I am at that moment ... you make it your home.

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