the Monday quiz

This week’s quiz has two parts:  can you identify the cities pictured below, and tell me which player was born in each one?

In some cases, the birthplace is a small town that belongs to a greater metropolitan area, so the bigger city is represented below.  And one city is the birthplace of five of our boys (I think it’s quite obvious which one that is).

This shouldn’t be be too hard if you read a lot about Real Madrid in Spanish, because the press tends to add the birthplace and year of birth of the players when they talk about them.  For example, this is from an article about Iker in El País:  “Ése es el camino que recorre Iker Casillas (Móstoles, 1981) cada vez que cambia el Madrid por la selección.”

Our boys are lucky to be from some beautiful places!  Click on picture to enlarge, and answers after the jump.

If you’re like me, you’re also wishing you were traveling right now…

Answers:

1.  Buenos Aires, Argentina – Fernando Gago.

2.  Rosario, Santa Fé, Argentina – Ezequiel Garay.

3.  Tolosa, País Vasco, Spain – Xabi Alonso.

4.  Funchal, Madeira, Portugal – Cristiano Ronaldo.

5.  Haltern, North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany – Christoph Metzelder.

6.  Brasília, Brazil – Kaká.

7.  Sevilla, Spain – Sergio Ramos (he was born in Camas in the province of Sevilla).

8.  Brest, Brittany, France – Gonzalo Higuaín.

9.  Salamanca, Spain – Álvaro Arbeloa.

10.  Bamaki, Mali – Mahamadou Diarrá.

11.  Madrid, Spain – Iker Casillas (Móstoles), Guti (Torrejón de Ardoz), Raúl, Antonio Adán & Esteban Granero.  Isn’t Cibeles lovely?

12.  Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil – Pepe.  I wish I were blogging from there…

13.  Paris, France – Lass Diarrá.

14.  Rotterdam, South Holland, the Netherlands – Royston Drenthe (surprisingly enough, he’s not from the province of Drenthe).

15.  Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, France – Karim Benzema.

16.  Rybnik, Silesian, Poland – Jerzy Dudek.

17.  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Marcelo.

18.  Heemskerk, North Holland, the Netherlands – Rafa van der Vaart.

Unfortunately for Raúl Albiol, whom you’ll notice is the only player not represented in this quiz, I couldn’t find a good picture of Vilamarxant, and being familiar with the province of Valencia, I thought a picture of the city of Valencia wouldn’t really represent it well, so I left it out.

How’d you do?