DaMarcus Beasley David Bergman/SI

Last week, Sports Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch interviewed U.S. national soccer-team star DaMarcus Beasley for the magazine's Q&A. The 23-year-old is currently playing in the Netherlands for PSV Eindhoven. Here are additional excerpts from the interview.

SI: So what's it like living in Eindhoven?
Beasley: It's a small city, a town which is very quiet. The downtown area is very small, but it's nice and cozy. It's like a suburb. I live in an apartment with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths. Europe is small and I'm an American, so I wanted a big place. It was one of the biggest apartments in Eindhoven, right in the center of the downtown area. I like it. The apartment was brand new so I had to put everything in it: carpet, lights, curtains, the fixtures in the bathroom. Everything I had to pretty much do myself.

SI: Does it remind you of any place back in the States?
Beasley: It reminds me of where I grew up [Fort Wayne, Ind.], though like nothing in particular there. Just the smallness of it. It's a place you can wake up in the morning and you don't hear a lot of loud cars and sirens and stuff like that like you do in downtown Chicago. It's a nice and quiet. An easy life.

SI: Has it been difficult to adjust to a 24-hour football lifestyle?
Beasley: No. It's been good. If you go out in the city, they want to talk about football. Automatically, they will say something about PSV. They are very passionate fans. They want us to do the same thing as last year which is almost impossible. You get a sense of the pressure of the fans. They are happy to meet you but at the same time they want you to win. So you have pressure from your teammates, the fans, pressure you put on yourself, pressure from the coach and the media. We're a big club in Holland, so when we lose a game, all hell breaks loose. We know we are not supposed to lose games in Holland. The mentality is very different. I went from being in Chicago where just making the playoffs is considered a good season to if we one lose one game, the whole city shuts down.

SI: Can you read about yourself in Dutch?
Beasley: When I have a bad game, I try not to read about myself. [Laughs.] But I mean, I very rarely read the paper because I don't really understand the language. Every now an and then I try to skim through it.

SI: You live in as liberal a country as there is in the world. As an American, what's your take on the lifestyle?
Beasley: Everybody is open about everything. You see naked girls on billboards if you are driving. People smoke weed on the street just walking around. You can smell it in the air. It's just natural. That took some time to get used to, to have people roll up like joints and blunts and just smoking and walking like nothing is going on. And prostitution is legal here. It did take some getting used to, seeing that and being around it. I was wowed by that. Now it's just like second nature. You smell it and go about your business. People smoke weed like people smoke cigarettes in the States. You can smoke it in clubs, in the streets, coffee bars. Some restaurants even allow it.