Hard to believe, but 3 weeks have passed since the last test in my German class. So, today was the day of the test for the current 3 week session. 

I’m pleased to report that I managed to get another “A” (a “1” in the grading system here) on the exam.  Whoohoo! I had a great deal of luck, though. There was a section on verbs with prepositions. There is no discernible logic to the pattens, it’s just brute-force memorization, which is definitely not my strong suit when it comes to language learning. However, while I only knew 75% of the 70 or so verbs on a list we’d be given, the ones on the test came from that 75%. What a nice surprise. 🙂

Of course, it’s not actually all that surprising I had luck with the test, I guess, since I remembered to bring our Glücksbringer — “good luck bringer” — to class today. Back in the fall, I started bringing in little Italian chocolate-coffee candies called “Pocket Coffee”  on the day of the test to share with everyone.When people eat it before the test, they have luck on the test. When they don’t eat it before the test, they don’t have as much luck. Truly. So, clearly it’s these Italian “Pocket Coffee” candies that are the key to getting a good grade on a German test.

But of course.

After class, we had another welcome surprise when the mother of one of the students in the class, who happened to be visitng from Greece,  made us all lunch. Delicious – thanks so much to my classmate W and her mother! 🙂 Due to the party, I won’t have time to respond to more of the recent comments, but I’ll try to add those to the comments over the weekend. Thanks, as always, for keeping those comments coming!

Anyway, the third “welcome surprise”, which I’m going to end this post today, comes from a recent experimental photo I took. We have a photo group that we’ve started here in Tübingen, and our theme a couple of weeks ago was “ice”.  Chris had an idea to freeze water in a wine glass, which turned out to be an interesting experiment. The water was initially level in the glass when it went into the freezer, so the resulting uneven pattern in the ice was a bit of  surprise, a decidedly welcome one that led to an unexpectedly textured photo.

Enjoy.

Ice Moon