Is there anywhere more boring than Gelsenkirchen?

[Gangster Octopus]

You lived in all of them?

[San Bernardhinault]

Bochum is a good call. But California’s Central Valley must be a winner for huge but shit towns. Bakersfield, Fresno, Stockton, Modesto... places to only visit if you want your car vandalized.

[ursus arctos]

ms. ursus grew up in Stockton and spent a summer working for a law firm in Fresno.

The only car-related issue we ever had in the Valley was when I drove her Ghia into a grape field outside Madera.

Not that you are wrong, of course.

[Lang Spoon]

Stoke

[Lang Spoon]

Ciudad Real.

[Lang Spoon]

I really want to visit Brussels and its funky suburbs. Only really going on an old Meades documentary re the suburbs but.

[Bored Of Education]

Brussels is a genuinely interesting city and great place to live, but is rather devoted to keeping this fact hidden from visitors.

Ha, that is possibly the issue but they are doing a very good job of hiding it. I should have qualified it that I went on a football weekend but, still, I have ascertained many qualities of cities from football weekends. However, Brussels, like Vienna, did not do enough.

[Bored Of Education]

If Schalke came from a decent place, they wouldn't have half as many fans. It's like Kaiserslautern and Mönchengladbach: The only thing of interest that happens there is a home game twice a month. And away games give you a reason to leave the place every fortnight.

Lens must be like this. City's population 31,398, club's average attendance last season 23,007 in a 37,705 capacity stadium. It's quite a nice place as well.

[Lang Spoon]

Vienna? Really? Fucking hell, I know I’m a pervert for liking wandering around Karl Marx Hof and the likes, but comparing it to Newport?

[Lang Spoon]

Naas, Navan, keeping it Irish.

[adams house cat]

Not lived in all of them GO but had to spend a few days and nights in all of them.

[Bored Of Education]

Newport maybe is a bit much. Birmingham maybe? It's nicer than Manchester, that's for sure.

I had yet to realise just how fortunate I am not to ever have gone on holiday with Bored.

You would end up in London, New York, Havana, Liverpool, Glasgow, Budapest, Bath, Barcelona and Skipton. When are you free?

I am also very fond of Prague, Faro, Copenhagen, Bristol, Belfast, Dublin, Edinburgh, Brno, Split and Nottingham (possibly for being notMansfield)

Toulouse and Paris have also gone back up in my estimations after boredom from visiting both too much as a youth.

[RobM]

I've been to Bakersfield, it's not that bad.

Nowhere near as bad as Gibraltar, fucking awful. Covenrty's not that great either.

[ad hoc]

I could name a few places in Romania but if we're looking at places over 200,000 population then I'll nominate Craiova It's hard to imagine that Gelsenkirchen is more boring than that

[Wouter D]

I just remembered four days I spent at a conference in Atlantic City in a November not too long ago. That trumped everything I've ever seen by a country mile in the boring stakes.

[ursus arctos]

The hotel should have paid the conference organisers for you to go there.

[JVL]

I just remembered four days I spent at a conference in Atlantic City in a November not too long ago. That trumped everything I've ever seen by a country mile in the boring stakes.

That prompted a long-buried memory to resurface for me: a business trip to Tampere, Finland. The meeting didn't go well, the weather was grey and miserable (unsurprisingly, really, as it was in October) and my colleague and I decided to have a wander around town. Everything seemed to be shut, there were hardly any people around and the highlight of the afternoon was spotting a sign to the effect that a Scottish gentlemen had installed the first light bulb to be used in the Nordic region in his factory there. That was it. Went back to the train station and headed for the bright lights of Helsinki, never to return.

I have no doubt that Tampere boasts hidden gems and wonderful art-house this, that and the other, but when I was there, it was shit.

[ursus arctos]

The Finlayson factory now houses the Finnish Ice Hockey Hall of Fame and an excellent local history museum, along with a bunch of shops and restaurants.

And that’s before one gets to the Moomin Museum.

[elguapo4]

Naas, Navan, keeping it Irish.

Let's face it,most mid sized Irish towns are pretty dull,you could've nominated anywhere on the Dublin-Galway line apart from each end.
Reading this month's Football Weekends magazine,the reviewer of Luton is trying his best but the only thing he can find of interest is the shopping centre and the hat museum (which is currently closed for renovation)

[Lang Spoon]

True dat. Though Kilkenny is really nice.

[Wouter D]

The hotel should have paid the conference organisers for you to go there.

I did spend six days in New York beforehand. Otherwise it would have been a dire trip indeed.

[San Bernardhinault]

There are some very small towns being nominated here. We might as well be nominating Didcot or Santee if this is the level we're playing at.

[Logan Mountstuart]

In perhaps the one truly hedonistic week of my life, I drove a Mustang overnight down from Yosemite to my friends place in Santa Barbara.

The route took me past Fresno, and I took a detour from the freeway to drive through it at 2 in the morning, thinking, fucking hell, Fresno! Next week you'll be delivering in Eindhoven again. I hadn't really seen any Louis Theroux documentaries at the time. If he went to Eindhoven, he could do a show about what happens on the streets when the koffie and gevulde koeken run out. The Mustang was crap really. An automatic, gutless hire car version that was supposed to make you think, hey I'm driving a Mustang. My old Cortina mark 3 had more poke.

I'm quite interested in the idea of towns with no real centre though. I'm sure Amazon are working on it.

[Bored Of Education]

Reading this month's Football Weekends magazine,the reviewer of Luton is trying his best but the only thing he can find of interest is the shopping centre and the hat museum (which is currently closed for renovation)

Woah, hold on, a hat museum? When's that re-opening?

[Sam]

You'd never heard of the Luton hat museum, Bored?

Its population is slightly over one fifth of Gelsenkirchen, so I'm not sure it qualifies for this thread, but I have twice experienced Ushuaia in their Summer months, and that city is irredeemably boring. At least in their Winter, there's skiing.

Is it not quite pretty, though? (Serious question; I've never been.) And you've got the thrill of not knowing whether today is the day you'll contract skin cancer.

I was going to say there are any number of places in the interior of Argentina (and I assume other South American countries) that would probably knock everywhere mentioned in this thread for six, in part because as well as being just as boring they're also hours and hours and hours from anywhere better. At least Gelsenkirchen is right in the middle of Europe, with (one assumes) easy transport links to all kinds of other places. I have, for example, passed through Posadas and would not want to spend any longer there than I actually did.

I've been lucky with places I've actually been to rather than through, though. Can't think of any especially dull ones. Montevideo's city centre is bizarrely dead at weekends but it's a charming city and if you're interested in football history there's arguably nowhere better on Earth. Juneau, the third largest city and state capital of Alaska (pop. about 30,000), is not connected by road to any other city, and would be a very strong contender for boringness if it weren't for the fact that when you're outdoors, wherever you are in Juneau, and whichever direction you're facing, you'll be looking at something absolutely jaw-droppingly beautiful.