Hohenecken, Attendorn, NAHncy

Everytime I go on one of these assignments I am confronted with very different situations.  This time I have not been disappointed with the differentness but I won’t bore anyone with that.  Regardless, I again find myself in Europe, coming out of the fog that is borne of travel and seeing the great opportunity that presents itself. Sorry for the flowery text but I just watched the 1953 movie about Martin Luther in prep for my trip next weekend to the city of Worms (say “Verms”), Germany.  Huge amount of history there but I will tell you about that later.  I am wrapping up my second weekend here in the Kaiserslautern community and have thus far spent the night in a German castle in Attendorn, Germany and wandered around the French town of Nancy.  It’s a lot of fun to say Nancy France with American pronunciation, but I have been schooled that the town is “Nahncy, Frahnce”, which truthfully is almost as much fun to say. I arrived without my snow boots, because I figured it can’t be much longer til spring.  Oh how wrong I can be.  There was about 3-4 inches of fresh snow on the ground when I got here and it all pretty much melted and evaporated within the first week.  Snowing in Attendorn at the castle on my next weekend was kind of a custom request I had fulfilled: a) because I believe in God, and b) because He likes to see me happy.  Then after I got home it was sunny and slightly cool but tolerable, which was convenient because the zipper on my awesome Korean winter jacket busted and I had to have it committed to a shop to be repaired. Then it started snowing again all day and all night dropping several inches of snow making everything look fresh and beautiful.  The roads and highways finally cleared up today and now the temps are dropping, it’s snowing heavily again and supposed to drop to minus 20 tonight.  That’s Celsius which sounds pretty bad…in Fahrenheit it will only be about 6 below zero.  But it’s so freakin beautiful.  I will take a picture from inside my room with the floor to ceiling windows overlooking the valley, the church and the hills beyond and post it on this blog-spot.  ZO, I got my jacket back, I have a couple of friends, and a very quaint restaurant downstairs with a fireplace and an endless tap.  Life is so unfair.
These pictures are (top to bottom to right): The 800 year old castle ruin above my house-Schlossberg Hohenecken; Schnellenberg Castle in Attendorn; my little village of Hohenecken with the hotel, castle and church all visible; the church outside my bedroom window this morning, covered in snow; the menu of the bistro in Nancy France (which nobody could interpret, so we had to point and guess - at least I knew how to avoid escargots); and lastly, the downtown of Nancy France.