Reading the Book of the World "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page" -St Augustine

We looked at the sign with concern. There were two arrows, painted across the chipped tiles that lined the archway. One pointed up a rickety flight of stairs, a handwritten scrawl above it stating "Kino." The other pointed straight ahead, at ground level, accompanied by the word "Schlachthaus."

"Well, the cinema is definitely here." The teacher spoke breezily, ushering us upstairs.

"Doesn't Schlachthaus mean slaughterhouse?" My friend whispered to me, as we followed our teacher past the graffitied tiles. At the top of the stairs, a man with a tatty grey beard that reached past his chest and equally tatty hair straggling down his back stood behind a desk. The desk was made of clear plastic, and filled entirely with beer bottle caps. He sold us the tickets and showed us to our seats. We were the only people in there.

We were seventeen, on a school trip as part of our A-level German course, in the late Noughties. Our teacher had been told of a good independent cinema and had decided to take us to see Das Leben Der Anderen. It won an Oscar later that year, although I doubt that the version the Oscar committee saw had an interval. The bearded man reappeared to change the reels halfway through. It took him some time, while the screen flickered, before the film finally continued.

Berlin lacks the beauty of Paris or Prague. It is scruffy, the frown lines of its past carved deeply into its face. But it is full of the unique, the bizarre, the utterly fascinating. Scratch the surface, talk to some locals, and you find a city where a cinema can be run by a lone film enthusiast on equipment stolen from the '50s in a tiny room above an abattoir. Or where people will queue for an hour to enter a salsa club, at three in the morning, comprising nothing more than a few decorated rooms and a lot of people having a fantastic time, and one girl (me) wailing in broken German that she doesn't know how to dance.

"It doesn't matter!"

It didn't.