I’m going to tell you my favorite story about my father.

He ran a business in Bellingham grinding lenses. When it failed, his partner made off with the money and his relatives, who had invested, changed the locks of the business so he wouldn’t get any big ideas about selling off the remaining equipment and leaving himself.

I imagine that was the low point of his life.

So he said to himself, “I can be broke here in rainy, dark, cold Bellingham, or I can be broke someplace nice.”

He scraped together the rest of the money he had and sent our two big sisters off to Honolulu find an apartment for the rest of us.

Born 1960, number 5th of 6. Bellingham, Washington. Rainy, gray, cold. But there was also Grandma and Grandpa.

1966. Lanikai, Hawaii. But you never appreciate what you have when you have it. I spent my time in paradise reading books in a dark room and dreaming of the Middle Ages.

Hawaii really is paradise, and a true melting pot. It was normal for me – a haole – to be in the minority.

How to become a writer in Europe if you’re a dumb kid growing up in Hawaii

In 1990, I had my Master’s but knew I was not cut out for academia. So I turned to the craft my father had forced me to learn.

I bought up every English-language newspaper I could find and called the editorial offices and asked them if they needed a correspondent. I was sure I would have not luck – guys who get correspondent jobs are either well-connected, or they have worked their way up from the mail room. I was sure they would smell the dumb kid in me.

But they said, “Send me something.”

So I wrote up a story about some eccentric German artist who was tattooing bar codes on his skin (he was the first) and the now-defunct “The European” printed it.

I was shocked. These guys didn’t care about degrees or CVs, they needed something to fill their pages.

It’s a lesson tat seems obvious to me now, but it wasn’t then:

A writer is kind of one-man business. His first question isn’t what to write or how, it’s what the reader wants to read. If he can figure that out, he can get someone to publish the story.

The stupidest idea I had about writing was that I didn’t have to learn it. The best thing my Dad did was to convince me to join the school newspaper and learn. At Kailua High School I edited the Surfrider, at the Brigham Young University in Laie I edited the Ke’alakai.

I was a believing Mormon and I knew there was a good chance I would accept a calling to go on a two-year mission for the church. I also wanted to get to Europe. So I devised a plan. You don’t get to decide where you go on a mission, but the church needed missionaries with foreign language skills, so decided to take a foreign language in high school – any foreign language. Neither Japanese nor Spanish would have –most likely – gotten me to Europe. I was with German.

Discovering a foreign country was incredible. I felt like an early explorer or an anthropologist, learning a new language an customs, trying to figure out an incurable people. so different form my own.

How living in Germany made an American out of me

And the definition of being young is when you believe it all.

When I left America, I knew nothing about politics – I cared only about writing.

But politics for Germans is what celebrity culture is for America: they talk about it constantly, and they know more about American politics than Americans.

Or at least they think they do.

I didn’t know then that Germany is, according to many polls, the most anti-American country in Europe.

But the more you hear how terrible your country is, the more you start to question what you’re hearing.

So I started to look into what I was hearing. Was America really dominating other countries with their exports of hamburgers, Coke and rock n roll?

Not at all – in fact, the opposite is true: For every dollar of goods and services American exports take out of Germany, German exports in America send 2 dollars back home.

Is Germany a socialist country, and American a capitalist one?

Germany spends about 55% of their state budget on social services every year – America spends 65%.

Is America racist?

After all, every year, some 200 to 400 illegal immigrants on the Mexican border trying to get in. The number of annual deaths of illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean trying to get to Europe is between 2000 und 3000.

What about America’s terrible history – slavery, the Indians?

The Germans know a lot about that – they learn it in school. But what they don’t teach in school is this:

Germany was also where I met my first big love, and after my mission I returned to marry her and study the Literature of the German Middle Ages in Munich.

It was tougher than I had imagined to finish my studies in a foreign tongue – not because of the language but, but because I wasn’t a natural academic. I didn’t want to study the Middle Ages in a dusty library, I wanted to see them. Years later, that’s what I did: I dropped everything and took a year-long trip through Germany and Austria in a VW van from castle to monastery to village in the footsteps of nine medieval heroes, and that’s how I found the Middle Ages. That journey changed my life and became my first book, “Die Nibelungenreise.”

After the divorce, with only a few articles to my name, I moved to Berlin, which was still thrumming from the energy that exploded when the Berlin Wall came crashing down. I knew no one, and I am a shy guy – so I decided on a plan: I found the best bar within walking distance and vowed I would be there at least once a week and not leave until I had talked with someone or it was after one in the morning. I had not money, so I ordered one whisky and just held it, leaning against a wall and talking to no one, for hours. Before the year was out, I had friends and before another year had passed, I had fallen in love again. Here’s to the storied, the famous, the infamous Zoulou Bar.