Chris and I were up earlier than usual yesterday to get to the train station, since Chris had a talk to give in another town. We passed a girl of about 10 standing on the street, calling up to the woman in a top floor window, Nicht vergessen! Du bist dort … um 11 Uhr! (“Don’t forget – be there at 11am!”) 

It seemed like an episode that would be at the beginning of a kid’s movie. Would the woman show up at 11am? Would they then head off an adventure together? Or perhaps the little girl and her best friend (usually a boy in those movies) wind up tracking down some mystery that involved that woman and the 11am appointment?

It just seemed like the start of an adventure/mystery story where anything could happen.

I bring this up, as it happened that today I actually had an appointment at 11am. (No little girls nor women in windows were involved with my story today, though). Rather, it was just that 11am today marked the start of my last class at the Vivat Lingua language school. Having completed half of the B2 level, I’ve decided not to continue with the intensive German courses anymore.  It’s been a fun 8.5 months of class, though, and I will miss all the wonderful people in my class, the fun owners of the school, and all the different teachers we’ve had over the months.

I had put together a little slideshow of photos from the course, and set it to a song from the Disney movie Toy Story, titled You’ve got a Friend in Me. Although we were a diverse group, from a dozen different countries over the different class sessions, and ranging in age from 18-50+, we all fell into friendship, right from the start.  That helped to keep the classes fun: we were serious about learning German, but didn’t take our mistakes so seriously that we couldn’t laugh at our mistakes.

Anyway, for my slideshow, I found and used the German version of that song. In German, one of the main refrains is Nicht Vergessen … Du hast ein Freund in mir. Which wasn’t exactly what that little girl said yesterday, of course, but the first part was the same. And her Thursday appointment and my Friday one started at 11am.

And it strikes me that while this is the end of one phase of life for me here in Tübingen, it’s also the beginning of many new adventures here, too. It will be fun to see how my regular routine reshapes itself after next week. Next week is a bit of an anomaly, since Pentacost is next week, and it’s a big week-long holiday here in Germany.

In fact, many German tourists head to Italy on vacation next week.

Hmm, now there’s a thought … Which reminds me,  Two to Tü will be on vacation next week. Regular posts will resume June 4th.  In the meantime, Happy Memorial Day! to everyone in the U.S. on Monday! See you in June.