What happens in Berlin, stays in Berlin...

so...everyone talks about New York's streets being paved with gold, of Vegas as the city of Sin and Secret, and LA as the city of dreams...

Unless by gold you mean a derivative of the Black gold that got Jed to Bev hills, and unless you dream of smog, endless traffic and strip malls that stretch for miles, they fall short. In my opinion, though, Berlin is that magical place that actually realizes and serves up the stereotyped attributes of...in my opinion...very very inferior metropoli.

Maybe Berlin's so great because it's cheap. Which means...you don't have to work 60 hour weeks to have a decent flat/food/access to ammenities. IT also means commercial rent is low, which means you can open a cafe/club/indie vintage lesbian porn store on a whim and not go broke. It's also full of expats, who are notoriously not-clique-ey because...they aren't settled enough to have cliques yet. You can quickly make a group of friends, but it's a big enough city that if you realise that the techno-speed scene is no longer your thing and you would like to take up yoga and knitting, you can move on too. It's a city that doesn't punish risk-taking behavior. Or at least not so harshly. So people take risks.
 
And when you take risks, you transform yourself. friend of mine said that everyone comes to Berlin and undergoes drastic transformations. [he was a tall, lanky, awkward and painfully shy boy from a good southern family back then. Now he's still tall and lanky...but fabulous and flamboyant.] You can go from being... a just out of AA coke addict to a magazine editor. You can drop that corporate PR job and for 300 euro a month, you can get a fabulous little storefront and for another few thousand, dec it out with fabulous vintage 70's ddr crushed velour and wood-laminate furniture and serve fabulous milchkafee and brownies to a fabulous set of people.

Or, you can go from being a...conservative, nerdy valedictorian with a hunch and overbite at a private school founded before her country who wasn't kissed until she was 19...to a high-end escort.

Berlin. Definitely a city for transformations.