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The rules of etiquette suggest that you should never begin a letter with an apology. Maybe it has something to do with displacing the balance of power, immediately placing your reader at a step above you as the forgiver or, perhaps, because it raises the awkward social ghost of an outed faux pas.

Whatever the reason, I've never been one for etiquette beyond the words "please" and "thank you", so ... I'm sorry that it's been such a long time since I last wrote here. I've been a very busy boy and I promise never to do it again.

However, instead of picking up where I left off - on the shores of Greece - I've instead decided to leap ahead to the present day, but with a "lick and a promise" that I'll one day set back the clocks to describe my journey to Ancient Sparta as well as my brief flirtation with clowning in London.

I promise.

Lick.

And now, for something completely different: Berlin, the City of the Black Bear, and the largest city in Germany courtesy of its 3.4 million or so inhabitants. Laid like a tablecloth over flat swampland, Berlin certainly captures the essence of linen left after a very messy dinner party. Several messy dinner parties in fact, including ones that saw the partitioning of the table so as to prevent disgruntled relatives from stabbing one another with their butter knives.

In every direction you'll see grafittied walls slumping in exhausted decay against resolute Neo-classical museums, repatriated ex-Nazi megaliths, occupied Soviet apartments and electronic glass juggernauts. The streets are wide and uncrowded, moreso due to their size rather than lack of people, and are patrolled endlessly by cyclists, young parents, dogs and prostitutes wearing bumbags. Mitte, the central part of the city, is also home to swarming packs of anglophonic tourists beating their way from drink to drink on one of many different pub crawls.

It was on my third night in the city, alone and preparing for a night filled with kebabs and reading, that one such pub crawl swept me up for binge drowning, thanks to the particularly forceful rip tide known to scientists as Becky Wolfe.

After many attempts to meet up with my high school friend, Becky and I had come to the conclusion that we'd never cross paths in Europe. So, you can imagine my surprise when, kebab almost in hand, I heard the thundering boom of an "Oh my fucking god!" followed by the sudden disappearance of a small family as Becky struck through them to tackle me. My first night of solitude - the first in about a month - was quickly replaced with a tour of various bars, including a shisha cafe and an awful nightclub, and the familiar strains of an Australian accent. Thankfully, Becky's company made for a good night.

I ended up hiding out in Becky's hostel room, as my own bed was lost in the labyrinth of early morning Berlin. Unfortunately her tour demanded that they all be up and packed by 7am, regardless of hangover, so that they could bus up to Amsterdam in time for a sex show. That left me, disoriented and cold on the streets and, tragically, staring down the barrel of a day wasted in bed.

In fact, this was the fourth day in a row that I'd technically wasted in Berlin. Dumped by the lightning ICE train from Hamburg on the previous Saturday morning, I'd found a bed in a student flat on the east side of the inner city. Here I was a guest of Andy, a German, Carlos, an El Salvadorean and Shiri, an Israeli. Unlike the tourist-driven powerhouse of central Berlin, their neighbourhood of Friedrichshain was a lot more relaxed, formed out of grids of Soviet-era apartments framing ramshackle parks.

The moment I stepped through the door, I was sat down in a chair and remained almost in that exact position until I went to bed hours later.

On my second day here, Shiri and her homosexual Israeli entourage took me to a nearby flea market. Just like every other part of the city, this market physically demonstrated the patchwork nature of Berlin. Each stall was run by whichever local needed to clear out their garage that week, meaning that it was possible to find kitsch toys from the 80s alongside Nazi-stamped school books. In one corner of the market there was a stall dedicated entirely to selling traffic lights, the cause of, presumably, a series of pile-ups taking place in some other part of the city that day.

It was Shiri who first pointed out the peculiar nature of Berlin to me. Speaking from her usual spot, half buried inside the grandmother of a couch that became my bed each night, she gestured out the window with a weak wrist. "Here everything seems really heavy, not in a bad way, but it's just too easy to do nothing. Can you feel how slow time moves here? If I'm not careful, I'd never do anything at all."

Shiri came to Berlin after escaping her compulsory military service in Israel. After only a few months in the army, Shiri underwent psychological testing before being classified "Profile 21" by the Israeli government. This means that she was found to be emotionally and mentally unfit for active army service and, as in Catch-22, was the only non-fatal way she could legally leave before her appointed time.

"You can find tips on the internet," Shiri told me, "they teach you how to act like you have a certain problem, like bipolar disorder, for example. The trick is that you can't just say you're crazy - people will know that you're lying, and you can't just start throwing things around and shouting, because that's too obvious. You have to work on it for about a month, not eating as much, not being interested in anything at all, breaking down and crying whenever you can. That'll get you an interview with the counsellor, but if they ask you if you're thinking about suicide you have to say no. That's the one that a lot of people get caught out on - no one would really admit that unless they were just looking for attention."

While Shiri spent her days singing Hebrew folksongs with her friends, Andy spent a lot of his time either sleeping, drinking, chasing women or fishing for eels in the River Spree. He'd caught a massive haul the day I arrived, and proudly showed me the frozen tubes, headless and brown-grey, sitting in the freezer.

"They were alive for hours after I cut off their heads, man, just slapping away at me in the bag until I could freeze them."

Maybe it was for this reason that Shiri insisted we eat chicken for dinner that night.

But, when my second day ended with me watching the sky blemish to dark purple outside, I knew that it was time for me to leave before I too was dragged down into the mire of Berlin's timelessness.

I left it too late, because it wasn't until Tuesday night that I ventured out of my hostel to experience the fruits of Berlin's non-touristy nightlife. Somehow I'd managed to team up with a group of British kids who were intent on checking out a place called "Cookies", a very exclusive bar that only opens on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Apparently it was the place to be, because after having a polite chat with the bouncer (who proclaimed himself as "an evil German genius", while stroking an invisible, white cat), we sardined ourselves into a tight set of drab rooms filled with smoke, loud music, painfully fashionable Berliners and an assortment of hyper-testosteroned transvestites.

Property and the need to be seen was the only real draw card for this place, at least to my ears, as that loud music turned out to be nothing more than a grinding, unimaginative dirge of house beats. Even the DJ seemed to know that he was a sham, taking constant breaks so as to smoke cigarettes in the corner with his "lady" friends.

Given the disappointment of stale Cookies, I was able to wake up early the next morning and make my way to the district of Kreuzberg for a walking tour. Berlin is famous for these tours, with hundreds on offer at varying prices and tailored to match each tourist's specific desire. However, you can sometimes get exactly what you paid for, and this free walking tour turned out to be led by a hungover man whose day job involved organising stag parties for British lads in Berlin. Moreso, though the pamphlet had hinted at the word "historical", the tour descended into continuous lacklustre gesturing at trendy cafes and art galleries, followed by the words "zis place ist very popular mit locals".

So, that brings me to Thursday, finally a day - my sixth - when the clouds parted and I actually tucked into the historical, cultural wonder that is Berlin. My first port of call was a proper, paid walking tour that took me around to the various locations integral to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Led by Jim, an easily excited history grad student from Minnesota, this tour weaved its way around the central part of Berlin, identifying the few remaining Reich buildings (such as what is now the Ministry of Finance, but in the past stood as the imposing Luftwaffe Headquarters) as well as the quiet, unadorned sites where the more notorious Nazi abodes stood. Hitler's bunker, for example, now lies beneath a car park, filled with dirt and concrete and, until the World Cup in 2006, completely unmarked so as to prevent the possibility of a Neo-nazi shrine.

Jim fed us his favourite subject with great vigour, but sometimes he became a little too zealous. A word for the wise - don't stand on the streets of Berlin, frothing at the mouth, as you continuously yell "Nazis" and "Hitler". The piercing stares of the bemused locals was enough to teach me that.

From here, I turned to the glorious wonders of the future (or at least the happier past), exploring the Reichstag's surrounding Tiergarten, the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe and, for a taste of something different, a museum of German film and television ensconced inside the technophilic Sony Centre. Interesting irony: the museum's TV screens are all provided by Samsung.

After spending a night in the bombed department store-cum-artistic squat-cum-trendy drinking hole Tacheles, I joined Michael, an Australian, on a walk through the grounds of Berlin Zoo.

Here I was to learn that it's not only people who are drawn down by Berlin's bear hug.

Every animal enclosure seemed to be home to creatures who'd studied copious notes on Profile 21. There was the lion who sat on his haunches, staring into space despite the bloody hunk of meat screaming out beneath his nose (it was also warned that he occasionally urinates on visitors). Another sad sight came in the form of an elephant, desperately reaching out with its trunk to grab at leaves hanging on the other side of a ditch - just too far out of its reach, unfortunately.

But, saddest of all, was the tiny polar bear caught in the grip of "stereotypical behaviour" - a condition normally found amongst caged animals in naughty circuses. For about fifteen minutes, Michael and I watched in horror as the polar bear took three steps forward, paused, and then took those same three steps backwards to pause before beginning the cycle anew. Its neighbouring bears could do little more than to look at us, as if to say "Yeah, you should see what he's writing on the walls of his cave."

A day later, fearing that I was starting to walk backwards and forwards between my hostel and the suspicious kebab shop across the road, I decided it was time to leave Berlin and its Lotos atmosphere before all sense of my self had sunk into its stained pavements for good.