The man from Panama

"Do you know where the Communism Museum is?"


How do I explain Carlos?

The first day I met him over breakfast at the hostel, he was carrying around a Russian newspaper.

"Oh, do you speak Russian?"

"Russian is my seventh language."

"Wow, you speak seven languages?"

"No, eleven."

This shocking piece of information was followed by a story about his travels and how he was some kind of situation (I don't recall the exact details) about how he was at some restaurant or something, and how he spoke German to the waiter, Dutch to the people at this table, English to the other table, and everyone was looking at him like, What just happened?

I don't remember the details because Carlos recounted several tales like this one, this a frequent situation he finds himself in life. After telling us about that, he talked about his bad experience with the Italian mafia. He told us how he "pimped out" his bike in Amsterdam. I also learned that he is from Columbia but now lives in Panama but also lived in Switzerland, China, Holland, and other places I probably forgot. He is only 32 years old. He is a hard character to track down.

Now, he is traveling indefinitely.

With stories like that, which he tells so casually and succinctly in English, how can you not like Carlos? I can honestly say that I never met anyone like him.

We agreed to go to the Museum of Communism together. He suggested that we walk there, he knew the way, but when we started wandering around aimlessly, I realized that he didn't know where we were going and quite frankly didn't care.

"I have a lot of stories," Carlos told me, "which one do you want me to tell you?"

"I don't care," I said, "we have time."

"That's right, we have our whole lives."

So he told me a story about how some Mexican cops tried to cause trouble with his friend, because that's the kind of thing that Mexican cops do, and the way he managed to get that out of that situation, by speaking to the cops in a Mexican accent and becoming their friend.

We talked about all the languages he knows, and we saw some people down the street making some motions with their hands.

"Oh, they are using sign language." Carlos said.

"Do you know that, too?"

"Yeah!" he said, and as we walked past these guys, he started jamming out on pretend drums. They weren't doing sign language, just some air drumming and he just joined the band.

We got to Wenceslas Square, and Carlos suggested we sit down and people watch. We sit on top of a big monument and we're talking, and all of a sudden, a bunch of kids surround us; they are taking a class portrait. Carlos immediately stands and joins the portrait and I follow him. The teachers take a ton of pictures but then they seem confused why there are so many people, and they start counting everyone. The kids pointed us out and we ducked away, laughing.

We continued walking around in circles. "Our conversation is more important than the museum," Carlos explained.

I suggested we look at a map, but to Carlos, speaking with the locals is much more fun. So he asked everyone for directions, trying to speak Czech, but I am not sure he really listened or understood the answers because we kept walking up and down streets, our footsteps getting smaller when it seemed like we were getting close. Finally we made it. I enjoyed our conversation, but at the same time, my New York City efficiency was starting to come out and I was just getting tired of looking for this museum in such a haphazard way.

It was an interesting history lesson about the state of communism in the Czech Republic and the Velvet Revolution. I zipped through the exhibit, having to wait for Carlos to finish. He was incredibly touched by the video that documented all the protests in the very square that we sat down in earlier and couldn't stop talking about it.

We went out to dinner. I suggested a place mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide, but when we walked in, Carlos thought the German tourists there were a bad sign. So he wandered into a jewelry store, asking in broken Czech where a good place to eat was that wasn't McDonald's. We ended up going to a pizza place full of locals.

"This place was meant to be," he exclaimed.

We had conversations about Panama, wars, religion, communism. It was fascinating and deep, but I started to get really tired. Our trip to the museum, which I thought would take a few hours, had taken all day. But it wasn't a bad thing. I may come back to Prague, but who can be sure if I will ever meet someone like Carlos again.

Two young men who burned themselves in protest of communism.