UPDATE: I now live in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and have been fairly inactive over the last several months, when I was in Muscat and Los Angeles, and unable to host. My apologies. But now, I'm back. I can host, if you're interested. I'm not Tajik, so it won't be a local experience, but as I spend more time here, I should get more knowledgeable.

CURRENT MISSION

As a child, one of the people I admired was Alexander of Macedon. One of my favorite movies is the film Die Hard, where Alan Rickman's character, Hans Gruber, says, "And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." I travelled a lot in my early twenties and slowed down in my late twenties. I'm trying to settle down, have a job, be more stable, etc., so that I can continue pursuing my love of travel. Travel is addicting...I think Alexander may have been one of the first examples of a travel addict. He wanted to go to the ends of the earth, but his ambition was too great, and his soldiers would go no further than India. He sulked and had to return to Babylon, where he perished. I'm slightly older than him when he died, and I'm now trying to earn my keep, control my ambitions, and continue my journey. I no longer want to visit every country in the world. I'll get to a hundred (this has been done), which was my goal as a child, but I've learned that a hundred countries is nothing but an attractive looking number.

ABOUT ME

My name is Charles. Recently, I have taken to using my birth surname, Pérez, over my stepfather's surname, Meigs, which is what is on my documents. I'm half-Cuban and half-Austrian of origin. My father came to the US when he was about 12 to flee the Castro régime in Cuba. My father was a cruel man, but I am proud about my heritage. I do cringe every time Ted Cruz brings up that his father had $100 attached to his body as some sort of cotton skin graft (or whatever the Rafael Cruz origin story is). When I was young, people used to call me "raft boy"-please note that my father took two airplanes to the US (one to Franco's Spain and then to the US).

I live in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. At this moment, this is my second/third day in that city. Based on past experience, I will put up front that I don't have a smart phone. If you ask me my What's App number, I won't have it. I can give you fine directions to my house, and after a couple of weeks, I will probably get a second phone (the "Couchsurfing phone") which allows you to contact me and others in Tajikistan, which I give to guests. I get so frustrated with touchpads. I type in the 100+ WPM range, which makes it difficult to use a phone with tiny buttons that I frequently miss (I have a bone disorder, so this makes touchpads worse). My fingers also move so fast that a lot of touch screens don't even acknowledge my desperate attempts to press things. I was on a flight from Frankfurt to LA this year and tried using the in-flight entertainment system, and try as I did hundreds of times, nothing happened. Eventually, I just pressed the screen extremely quickly and I think I made it adapt to my "touch speed." Anyhow, the local phone should make up for the experience of staying with someone who doesn't use smartphones in 2019.

I've always been obsessed with history and geography since I was a tyke, and learned all the countries and capitals of the world and really wanted to appear on the show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego because to put it in more modern terms, I would have owned that show. I still hold out hopes to be a Jeopardy contestant, as many people I know have won between twenty and a few hundred thousand dollars out of that and it would be in my element. When I was young, I wanted to go to a hundred countries. I don't care about this counting and numbers and such things anymore, it was a phase in my life, though I probably will make it to that number by forty at least (and I did so at 34, I'm on 101 now). I have a lot of other interests-as a kid, I was really into basketball and baseball and I still know American sports pretty well (I also know "football" decently, because I work in countries where that is the most popular sport). I like to discuss art, politics, religion, not so much science, travel; one of my beliefs is that knowledge is a form of currency that can't be measured, as is uniqueness in experience. If I were offered a Ferrari, a $5,000,000 home, and $50,000,000 in a Cayman bank account in exchange for a lobotomy, I would easily say no, as I want none of those things. My fairly limited goal right now is to continue seeing the world, experiencing it, interacting with new cultures, etc.

I understand that being American, I was born into a life of certain privileges that most in the world will never have. I have a passport that takes me to most countries fairly easily and cheaply. I did not want for things as a child or a teenager. I went to a well-regarded university. I am more troubled than I have ever been by my country's behavior, but I cannot deny what it afforded me and still affords me to this day. I have lived in Syria and Yemen and it pains me to see what has happened over the last several years and what still happens as I write this. My parents wanted me to be a State Department official, but given what has happened since 2003, I am sort of glad that I'm not part of the now gutted US State Department.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I like hosting people in Couchsurfing because Couchsurfing is a community that can connect you with very interesting people from countries I haven't spent much time in. I'm generally knowledgeable about most of the world, so I can provide travel advice and so forth.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've hosted some people, stayed with others, met others. I have Couchsurfing experience in Albania, Croatia, Tunisia, Ukraine, the USA, Senegal, Canada, Portugal, Argentina, Italy, and Oman. Those places are so completely different from one another that I can't begin to describe my experiences. All good experiences, nothing terrible has happened.

My best experience: I stayed with some Nigerian shoe salesmen in a really hard to find suburb of Dakar, Senegal. I worried them a bit when I said I was going out walking, and then kind of got lost in some kind of local dance event, but figured out how to get back to their building. And that night, as we slept, three guys on two mattresses in one tiny room, I was able to use their ancient desktop to connect to the Internet and watch the World Series (baseball) with a brilliant connection. It was just the weirdest thing, being in very difficult conditions, but yet, being able to connect to my own country.

Interests

Travel, geography, history, books, computers, sports-mostly American, US football, basketball, baseball; though I'm not ignant (I prefer the Southern form) about soccer.

I'll note here that I'm a writer by passion. Well, you write what, exactly? I get asked. Stream of conciousness-type satire often about politics and religion, I guess? And being a writer, I am extremely verbose. I will send messages that look like short stories. It's out of love, really. And I type 95 words a minute, so I can be verbose and yet not spend eons writing a message.

• writing
• books
• picnic
• walking
• politics
• reading
• traveling
• sports
• baseball
• basketball
• soccer
• golf
• geography
• history
• languages
• religion

Music, Movies, and Books

Movie tastes range from actually good (Lawrence of Arabia) to lovably terrible. If you share my love of either Pure Luck, Weekend at Bernie's, or Forces of Nature, we're destined to be lifelong friends. Die Hard is great. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

As far as books go, I like and write postmodern fiction. My favorite book is the Crying of Lot 49. Honestly, I usually read non-fiction; travelogues and history.

Um, music, 70's or 80's or 90's, please. I basically stopped paying attention to popular music in 2006, when I graduated university. Though I do love a catchy, stupid song. I've got to admit, that if I ever speak Romanian to you, it's because I know all the words to Dragostea din Tei, and I can figure out ways to manipulate those words (I know some other stuff 'cuz I went to Romania and Moldova). "Sunt eu, Picasso", ah, "Eu sunt Charles."

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Ending up in Rome the same day Pope Benedict XVI was elected, taking a motorcycle tour of Cappadocia with my girlfriend, crashing an Iranian students' picnic near Yazd, Iran, nearly being thrown off an Iranian train for "making people laugh," proving that you can travel in Mali in the middle of the night (albeit in the cab of a pickup truck with seventeen freezing Malians who are wondering what you're doing there)

Teach, Learn, Share

One thing that I have found, and it's natural for me, but may not be for others is that caring to learn some of the local language can be important. Here, I'm not talking about major languages like Spanish, French, Italian, German. You might need those languages to get around, and they're good to know, but the reality is that those are the most commonly taught languages. People in countries which speak those languages will appreciate your speaking them, but what I'm trying to say is don't forget the little guys. You might think Hungarian or Bulgarian or Albanian or Turkish are not particularly useful languages. You're right, if you live in the US or UK. But if you go to such countries, and familiarize yourself with the language to a small extent (you don't have to be fluent, just 10-100 words) you will have an amazing experience. You might be treated differently than you thought was possible. I speak Turkish well, and my experiences are very different from other travelers I know who have been to Turkey. I almost always have an invite to somebody's home to stay the night and eat, and the shock level is palpable. Speaking more tangibly useful languages is great and awesome, but it has not gotten me the level of respect that speaking less taught languages. To provide a more feasible example, I speak about 50-100 words of Albanian. Nobody in any foreign country learns Albanian in university. Their first question is usually, "are you Albanian by heritage?" When you say no and stammer through their language, their hearts open up and suddenly a difficult country to navigate becomes one of the best experiences of your life. So, go to small countries, learn a bit of their language, and see what happens. I'm pretty sure it'll surprise you.

What I Can Share with Hosts

English language. Spanish, Arabic, Turkish. Unique takes on history/geopolitics.

Countries I’ve Visited

Albania, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Belize, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kosovo, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Martinique, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Myanmar, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Oman, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Thailand, Togo, Vatican City State, Virgin Islands, U.S.

Countries I’ve Lived In

Argentina, Oman, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United States, Yemen

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