Grad School
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There was the draft. And the only place where you couldn't get drafted was West-Berlin. Apparently seeing a psychiatrist for three years as a failed suicide hadn't been enough not to get drafted.

Berlin had the reputation of being the most left-wing (Rudi Dutschke had been there, hadn't he? Pity he got shot...), crazy and bad-assed university in all of Krautland. They had excellent China Studies/Sinology and Philosophy departments and it was far enough away from home to satisfy me. I had to check out a big city and what better city than Berlin to start with? (People over there think that only NYC could possibly be more interesting than Berlin.)

So I applied to grad school, got accepted, rolled four joints and got into a Mercedes with my old friend Burkhard and the incredibly sexy Tina. Since Burkhard had to drive, he couldn't partake in the perishables and since the border to the GDR was coming up rapidly, Tina and I had to hurry. We were flying in no time. We took this little country road - The Corridor - surrounded by the communist countryside and communist coal-smoke and every couple of minutes we had to cross some damn railway tracks which hit us like lightning in the head.

It took forever and when we finally rolled into Berlin, it was already evening. Everywhere I looked I saw concrete, and huge gray walls. My heart tried to emulate a U-Boat under attack while I asked myself what the fuck I had gotten myself into. So many people and so much construction? Being from a tiny village in the boondocks I felt overwhelmed.

If I had known then that it would take me almost a year to find a place to live, I would have probably left right away. I slept in lofts and on couches for ages, until my then girlfriend Sabine (also doing China Studies) and I found a tiny little hole in some backyard in a rather wild district of Berlin. We had to not only renovate, but rather re-build the place as it had been intentionally destroyed by the former tenants. Sabine, a really tough punk-girl (me, a hippie with long blond hair) was in tears when after ten days no noticeable progress had been made.

But we fixed it and turned it into a really cool place, right next to a canal with trees everywhere. Lots of Turkish neighbors and the market was 100% Turkish, where nobody spoke a word of German. It was a pleasant year. Sabine still lives in the same building and it doesn't sound as if she is planning to leave either.

As for the university.... The philosophy department was a total write-off, but the China Studies one was right on target. Located in the villa which originally belonged to a heavyweight boxing champion of the world in the thirties, Max Schmeling, it is the German equivalent of the FALCON program at Cornell, which again is sponsored by the DoD.

I did half a year of Sanskrit/Hindi as well, but those guys lived in the glory of the past with dust settling on the professors' spectacles, so I concentrated only on China after that.

And here I am now. Burkhard (M.A. Urban Planning) is a taxi-driver in Berlin, Tina went back to Flensburg and is a singer in a Latino band. Sabine is a head-nurse in some hospital in Berlin. Burkhard, Sabine and I all started our jobs to make some pocket money while we were still students.

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