We used to buy bongs out of a plastic bottle with a kick hole in it and filled with water, a pen (the chillum) and tin foil. It gets the job done and you don't need more than 10 minutes to build em.
Some years ago I was on vacation in Italy and we bought some hash from a guy on the beach. We didn't wanna smoke that stuff in a joint cause that can taste awful. Instead we built a bucket behind our car on the parking lot. Imagine us 5 stoned dudes stumbling back to the beach

And another day we didn't have papers and didn't want to smoke the bucket (I'm no bong smoker either, it's to harsh for me) we used some baking paper from the oven. That shit tasted like... well shit
The craziest thing I ever witnessed were some guys I was camping with who got this double barrel pump (for small boats and such). They put the joint on the tube, sucked the smoke in, changed the direction of the airflow and then pumped it straight into their lungs. I prefer to take my 7 minutes to chill and smoke a sweet joint instead of rushing and inhaling the same amount of smoke in some seconds.
Yo Wax, how was it like to get some weed back when you lived in Neubrandenburg? I remember times in Schwerin when there seemed to be no single bud in the whole city for weeks. Sometimes there even were grains of bird sand in it and shit like that. The situation totally depended on how much weed was around in Hamburg cause most guys got it from there and sold it in Schwerin. I always wondered how hard it had to be to get some if you lived further east.