A city on the cutting-edge, Berlin has often been in the spotlight on the world stage over the past 100 years. This is a city where constant change is a given. Sure, the Wall isn't there any more, but Berlin is still very much divided: in the centre of the city, there's a pretty neat segue from the wealthy glitz of the west to newly developed central east Berlin. This area was quickly colonized by the trendy café-bar set in the early 1990s and swift rebuilding has erased nearly all trace of the wall. It's the suburbs of East Berlin with their grew and decaying apartment blocks, cardboard cars and paucity of telephones that make it apparent that the Wall was up to protect a utilitarian East from a decadent West.

Before it came down, the Wall was the most enduring icon of a nation's disharmony. But it's not as if the city hadn't seen it all before. From the civic turmoil of the Thirty Years War, to the devastating impact of the fire-bombing during WWII, Berlin has constantly been under siege or in a post-siege rebuilding phase. Even in the middle of trouble and strife, though, Berliners have continued to live it up. This is the city where cabaret and techno were born. There's an edgy out-there quality to the nightlife - think Sally Bowles and her divine decadence through to the contemporary cool of Blixa Bargeld and Nick Cave's tortured noise poetry - that is both intimidating and exciting. Whichever way you spell it, Berlin means groove.