… and I’m still taking photos of that same spot on the Neckar River. There’s a reason it’s referred to locally as the “Postcard Shot”, I guess.

Of course, 99 posts ago back in September, in my first post on the Two to TÜ blog, the river did look just a little bit different than in does in the photos I took of it today. Although we are indeed having a little heat wave of a sort today, but the snow and the ice is still here, as the temperature was still below freezing.

Anyway, I did want to make a quick note that this post today is indeed my 100th post on the blog. How time flies. We’ve now lived in Tübingen for over 5 months, if you can believe it. It’s been a busy but fun time for me to be cataloging here on the blog. And, of course, I’m finding the city — and that river — pretty photogenic.

I think another reason I take so many photos from that spot on the bridge over the Neckar  is that I pass by there twice a day on my way to and from my German class every day, Monday through Friday. I started that class shortly after I started writing this blog, just a few weeks after we arrived here. As I’ve mentioned, I’m still plugging away at it, and still having fun, when I’m not trying to cram 500 words into my head before a test. 😉

But I do know a few more words than I did when I wrote that first post. My class is now considered advanced enough, at our lofty B1.2 level ;-), that we all have to give 10 minute presentations in front of the class before the end of next week.

My presentation was today. The assigned topic was to talk about your native language. But, since there are two Americans in the class, I asked to speak about Italian instead so we wouldn’t have duplicate presentations. However, since I don’t speak Italian like a native, I opted to talk about the relationship between German and Italian. In particular, I talked about a discovery by the German linguist Jacob Grimm that revolutionized the study of historical linguistics. I have a Ph.D. in Linguistics, actually, and it’s not often I get to use it. 😉

Anyway, Jacob Grimm was also famous for the writing he did with his brother. As in the Brothers Grimm. So, in his honor, and because I always like to find something a little different to do, I presented Jacob Grimm’s linguistic discovery as “The fairy tale adventures of Junger Jakob” (“young Jacob”) complete with photos of the witch (well, of course there was a witch) and of all the places in Italy Jacob visited in order to do solve the witch’s challenge. So that he didn’t get turned into a frog.

Well, it was a fairy tale after all. I pointed out to the class, after I told my story, that Jacob Grimm really did discover this “hidden” relationship between Italian (really, Latin) and German, a discovery that really did have a major impact on the study of historical linguistics.

As for the part about the witch and the frog … well, it turns out that the first fairy tale that the Brothers Grimm wrote — and the one that is always the first one in any book of their collected stories —. was Der Frosch König, The Frog Prince.

So, was the part about the witch true or false? You just never know.