Monday, November 24, 2014

I LIVE

*ducks in quickly*
I'm alive. Just thought you should know. And NaNo has not conquered me yet -- I'm super behind, but I think I can make it.
Also, I think I've managed to make my Germany pictures a public file on Facebook, so you should be able to see them here. (If the link doesn't work, someone tell me so I can fix it, 'kay?)
Also, I got to see my family for an early Thanksgiving! Life is great!
Ok. That's all I have time for.
Bye!!!
~Mags

Monday, November 3, 2014

NaNo Has Begun!

Ok, so it actually started Saturday. But Saturdays are my longest days, and then Sunday was a newcomer's lunch at church and a long hiking adventure, so I was exhausted when I got home and went to bed at 8:30.
But today! Today I sat down and cranked out over 5,000 words (the number for today is supposed to be at 5,001, and I think I'm going to write some more tonight and get myself something of a cushion).
My protagonist is bitter and sarcastic, so very easy to write (shush, Dad) and my ploy of writing dialog twice -- once in German and once in English "translating" has already proven both fun and word-heavy. :D
So yeah -- back to work I go!

(Oh, also: it may look like there's two of me posting on here for a while -- I'm trying to figure out how to switch blog ownership from one gmail account to another, and so far have only figured out how to let my other account post as an additional author. So... yeah. But it's still just me.)

Laters!
~Mags

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Update



Hullo.
*clears throat* Right. Hi, then.
Long time, no blog. It gets harder to blog the longer I’m here. A) Because there’s not as much new and interesting to write about, and B) because long-term writing projects and I never have gotten on well.
But here’s a quick update, and I’ll try to be more regular again – though I think I’m going to start doing short entries, more like glorified Facebook status updates. Not these chapter-length gizmos I’ve been churning out. Sound cool? Well, if not… :P It’s my blog and I’ll fudge if I want to.
Right. So. Started a new language course. This one only meets thrice a week, which is nice – I go on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, which means I have Monday completely free and most of Wednesday. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time at Starbucks and the library, indulging in English television shows and movies. (Side note: I rewatched the first Captain America movie yesterday, and if you see Joss Whedon will you tell him I want my heart back? Thanks.) I’m also still reading a lot – I think I’m up to something like 52 books in the last four months? Not a bad average…could be better, but I’ve abandoned a few that weren’t interesting, so.
Next month is November, which means National Novel Writing Month (which is now International, but InNoWriMo just doesn’t have the same jazz to it) which means No Plot, Lots of Word Padding, and Guilt Monkeys Galore. My blog entries in November may consist mainly of “Word count met for the day. *Wilts*” and so on. :D But I’m going to try for it. I’ve haven’t really won NaNo since my first year in…what, 2009? Pretty sure it was the year before I went to college. So I’m trying again this year. I’m doing an urban-fantasy rom-com set in Frankfurt, and before you laugh I have my reasons:
1.  My sister and I are both trying genres we haven’t ventured into before this year: she’s doing sci-fi, and I’m trying the whole rom-com thing, but I had to throw in the fantasy because I just don’t know what to do without at least an elf or two or a mad scientist or some kind of alien invasion or magic or something.
2. If I set it in Frankfurt I can use real places I go and things which means I can describe things accurately in a real setting without having to do a ton of research.
3. If I get desperate for words I can start artistically translating into German. :D
Nothing much else is going on – I’m super homesick, which is great (I think it makes my parents happy, lol) and I’ve decided that while I still like Europe, Germany isn’t really top of my favorites list. I’m down to two hundred and fifty-one days until I fly home. Not that I’m counting. :D
I’ve been going to ICF (International Christian Fellowship) every week and I really like it – to the point that I slipped and actually called it “my church” instead of “the church I’m going to” to a friend today. I’ve met a few people there who are really nice, and I’m attending a Thursday-night Bible study – though it’s really late and far for me to be out, and if another group starts up closer to home, I’ll be switching to go to that instead.
So, yeah. That’s my news – or lack thereof. I guess I can add that I’ve been vacillating back and forth between going to grad school when I get back or working a year first. The choice was heavily weighted by the fact that I Did Not Want to take the GRE, but I recently did some more research and found five or six schools that don’t require it if you’ve got a high enough GPA. So… yeah. We’ll see. The one I most want to go to still requires a GRE score, but not for all its programs, so I’m waiting to hear if they waive it in some situations. I’ve got a while yet before I have to decide, but I’m trying not to leave it for the last minute, either.
It’s getting cold here, and it’s full-on dark by six o’clock, which makes it feel much later than it really is. For example, it’s only 8:30 and it feels like it’s about eleven. So I’m going to go post this, curl up with The Order of the Phoenix and some hot cocoa, and turn in for the night.
Laters!
~Mags

Monday, October 6, 2014

Some Days These Feet Just Take to Wanderin'...



So: my latest big adventure!
Friday (October 3) was a free day in Germany – German Reunification Day. Kinda like the Fourth of July except basically nothing happens. :D Everyone is off work…which means everything is closed. Everyone is free, but there’s nothing to do.
I, however, am quite self sufficient. And adventurous. And maybe just a smidge stupid. So I decided I was going to visit Kronberg, a small town on the outskirts of Frankfurt with a medieval district. My ticket only took me from Frankfurt to Eschborn – erm… Here. Have a map.



Ok, so Frankfurt is down in the bottom right, and Eschborn is just right of the center. I was aiming for Kronberg, which is up in the top left corner. Now that you know the terrain…
So I got off the train at Eschborn and hiked the rest of the way to Kronberg. It’s about 7 miles from Eschborn to Kronberg, at a gentle incline – that dark green on the left edge of the map is some low mountains. Kronberg sits just in the foothills.



Anyway, it was a nice hike. I was pretty proud of myself for walking that far – the weather was lovely, the landscape interesting and pretty… And over the course of the day I saw about twelve of my namesake birds (magpies) in the fields and trees. Made me quite happy. :D


I got to Kronberg at about noon or so, and made my way through the suburbs to the Altstadt – a medieval village with some very stereotypical German architecture.




 But it was still early in the day (ish) so I decided to keep going and see what was on the other side of town. I had seen what looked like a castle or a church as I was coming into Kronberg, and thought it surely couldn’t be too much further.

Well, technically the Kronberg “castle” (more like a medieval manor with a wall, not the stone-walled fairy-tale Lord of the Rings thing you’re picturing) wasn’t too far. But I walked right past it thinking I’d come back after I’d seen what was “just over the next hill”. Which turned into “the next hill”. Which turned into “this freaking big hill that I’m going to get to the top of if it kills me.”

And then, when I had reached the top of said freakishly big hill, I saw it: a ruined tower. (this picture is actually from when I was nearly there -- not when I first saw it off in the distance.)



Now we’re talking Lord of the Rings stuff. I couldn’t leave it unexplored, now could I? No – but I underestimated the three-mile hike up the mountain that would get me there. I had to stop frequently – the road was pretty much a 30-45 degree angle the whole way, and my heart was pounding so hard I thought my jugular might burst right out of my neck. I probably should have slowed down, or turned around and gone back, but I’m stubborn like a mule sometimes, and I wanted to see the castle.

Well, after what seemed like an eternity (though it was really just another hour and a half or thereabouts) of agony, I made it. The road went from a city street to a suburban lane to a mountain road to a dirt trail, but at long last I arrived:


Falkenstein. 


Falkenstein literally means “Falcon Stone”. I can’t find just a whole lot about it on the Internet other than a basic Wikipedia article (and I haven’t yet gotten around to translating the placards I took pictures of) but I gather that it’s an early medieval fortress. (Such deducing. Much wow.) 







Early 14th century, apparently. But it has been abandoned for long enough (since the 1800s, I think) for the walls to all fall in, and the castle itself is filled up with earth. The arrow slots that would have at one point been at eye level are now half-buried in the ground. I ate my lunch inside what once would have been the castle’s chapel – now open to the air and with very little to say that it was once “inside” at all.

 


The hike up the mountain to the castle was tough, but once I was there – the view made it all worth it. And yeah – I ate my cheese sandwich in the ruins of a medieval fortress in the German mountains. No biggie. :D

I also happened to be there on a very fortuitous day – Friday and Saturday only, the tower was open to the public. I was a little surprised at first that it wasn’t normally open to the public – after all, I had to pay two Euro to get in, it’s not like it was just an open park – but once I started climbing up, I understood why.


 The stairwell was so narrow and steep it was more like climbing a chimney than a flight of stairs. The steps themselves were often only about four or five inches deep, and the walls of the tower pressed so close I had to squeeze my backpack though. I’m not sure how a man in armor would have gotten through – even if medieval people were smaller than the modern sort.


There was a little room about halfway up that I stopped in. To a 21st century viewer, the ~eight-by-four-foot space looked too small for anything other than a storage closet, but I suppose at the time of its construction it could have been a guard chamber, an armory – or even a bedroom! 

I explored the ruins a bit more, climbing around in fallen towers and taking a peek at the outside – trying to imagine what it must have looked like in its prime. It’s hard, but there’s a handy artist’s representation that helps a bit. 


Around three, I reluctantly decided I needed to leave. The sun is already setting pretty early here, and I knew that even if I managed the same pace on the way back as I did the way there, I wouldn’t make it back before eight. And by this point, I was extremely tired. My legs – especially after the mountain and the tower stairs – felt like cheap plastic straws, and I had a headache the size of...well, the size of a medieval castle ruin. :D

Fortunately, the trip back was all downhill – sometimes quite steeply downhill, but it’s still a bit easier than up

The trip home was every bit as arduous as I’d anticipated. The title of this blog comes from a line in an Andrew Peterson song that says “Now and then these feet just take to wandering / now and then I prop them up at home / Sometimes I think about the consequences / sometimes I don’t.” This was one of those “sometimes I don’t” times. Though I’m glad I didn’t – if I had known how sore and tired I’d be by the time I got home, I think I may have chickened out. :D

I was also really hungry. I’d taken a lunch, sure – but that was four hours and a bunch of mountain miles ago. I passed a house that had a box of apples from a tree ‘round back, and a sign bidding me to take what I wanted. I helped myself to one – and let me tell you, that was the best apple I have ever eaten in my life. Perfectly crisp, sour and sweet in perfect balance, and so juicy it dripped down my arm. Mmmm. 


But two miles later I was still hungry – I’ve gotten used to eating smaller meals here, and I rarely eat much anymore. But I hadn’t anticipated all this fresh air and exercise playing up my appetite! All I had was a little bit of water – and I was sooooo thirsty. So it was with great joy that I topped a hill to see the Glowing Golden Arches of Hope in the distance – McDonalds: the haven of the weary traveler worldwide. :D


I don’t think I’ve ever been so thrilled to taste a chicken sandwich.



From the McDonalds, it was only another half hour or so to the train station, where I exhaustedly boarded the train heading back into Frankfurt. I nearly fell asleep on the way, but it was totally worth it. I doubt I’ll make it back to Falkenstein again – or at least not in the near future! – but now that I know I can make it 14+ miles in a day, I’m going to be doing this sort of thing more often. (Actually, since Friday, I’ve racked up about 23 miles of walking. Pretty darn good for this erstwhile couch potato!) In fact, I hear the castle that may have inspired Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein isn’t too far off…something like an eight hour hike…
More adventures to come soon, so keep checking back!

~Maggie