Sunday 10th July

When I visited Cat last weekend I met Debbie, another Exeter student who I’ll be living with next year. We arranged to meet up again today so that we could get to know each other a bit. We agreed to meet at Karlsplatz, but I got there five minutes early and was absolutely bursting for the toilet. I ran about for ages, tears in my eyes, desperately searching for a loo when Debbie called and suggested I go to the one in the underground station. Oh my word these stations are hard to navigate. It's the most ridiculous signposting system in the world. They'd be better off not putting up any directions and letting us sniff the toilets out ourselves. The signs are so confusing; it's like they're put there to deliberately mess with your mind and challenge your bladder control capabilities. I honestly considered squatting in a corner somewhere in the station. Or maybe they just do it so that by the time you find the toilets you don't care that they're charging 70p to get in; I would have given £70.

Bladder relieved, I went to Karlskirche to meet Debbie. We walked to the canal together and had a picnic of Mc Donalds, lebkuchen and watermelon. First impressions, she's really nice and we'll have fun sharing a house next year.

After the picnic I had to get changed into more modest clothes because I was meeting a couple of Iranian believers that I met at the Oasis on Friday night. They'd invited me to their church and we arranged to meet at a high profile station so that I would be able to find it OK. But somehow I got hideously lost and was thirty minutes late. I was planning to change in the bathroom at Philadelphia Bruke station but because I was so late I had to change in between stops in the platform. Let's just say I’m no Houdini. I ended up ripping the sleeve off the top I was changing out of. Arrgghh! It's so frustrating.

I find the transport system here really confusing. The stations aren't very well marked so it's hard to tell when to get off the train. It was only as I approached the end of the line that I realised I'd gone too far. Then when I finally made back it to Philadelphia Bruke station, I found myself trapped in an underground labyrinth of escalators, kiosks and passageways. I went up here, down there, through that way, past the kiosks, back upstairs, round the pillar and I still couldn't find my friends. In the end they came looking for me and we were on our way.

Going to an Iranian church was really interesting. I recognised some of the songs- they must have been translated from English, but judging by the music most of them were written for the Farsi Church. Singing in Farsi is definitely a challenge for me. I find it hard enough to keep up with the words of a new song in English, so trying to read the lyrics in the Persian script in time with fast music was hard. It should help improve my overall reading speed for when I’m back studying Farsi at uni.