Rebecca is an ex-pat living in Germany and while it is not quite clear, I believe she works in an environmental sciences field or is just someone passionate about global warming and reducing her carbon footprint in daily life.
Wait, wait… don’t click away. Stick with me. I love this blog. In June of this year, Rebecca packed up and moved to Bonn Germany from Bath England. She
She states “Aah, a fresh new blog, ready for me to crumple and soil with imperfect English.” After reading each entry, I want to know if she wrote BEFORE June 11, 2007 because I would love to read those journals and know what she was up to, what prompted the move.
Her journal is a mix of personal views such as “my new city looks like a Playmobil set” and articles and theories on global warming, all woven together with wonderful observations and humor. The global concerns portion of her blog isn’t preachy or boring. She even takes on the Queen of Pop, Madonna, and ponders the song Madge wrote for Live Earth this year. “The glaciers aren’t really retreating, species aren’t really becoming extinct, and that guilt you feel when filling up your car is an unreal emotion to be shrugged off. Why is it that with Madonna, even a song about the planet becomes a song about loving yourself? Unreal.”
It is actually interesting and very well constructed so that someone who isn’t exactly of the same philosophy doesn’t feel like a finger is being pointed at them. Rebecca writes with a keen sense of humor and a slice of cynicism. She talks about her new daily life in Germany, the piles of drunks in the Bonn train station, and about the crazed German bikers who run the banks of the Rhine.
Daytrips around Germany on her days off help her get out of Bonn and see the German Countryside. She treks to what used to be East Germany and writes about Martin Luther and religion and the unification of the country… which sometimes I forget only happened a few years ago (thank you David Hasselhoff!). She goes to Mainz and talks about how the buildings there are as pink as the ones in Bonn are yellow. She treks to an Indian/Hippie music and love festival near Leverkusen where she feared she’d soon be swept up by braless, yogariffic, smiling, zombie dancers.
The only complaint I have is with the layout of the blog. There isn’t an easy way to access archives so one can start at the very first entry and proceed forward. I clicked backwards through “previous entries” and luckily this is a young blog or I probably would have stopped right around the time her blog begins, and just review from that point onward. A good archive section that links out the entries from the beginning would be a great asset as the content of the blog grows and time goes by. The look and feel of the journal is easy on the eyes, but sometimes the quoted sections from articles that she selects have too light a grey color and the font isn’t easy to read. The rest of the site moves easily, with lots of photographic evidence that Bonn really is a city filled with way too many yellow buildings.
I will revisit Rebecca, and will probably blogroll her… I don’t know what brought her to Germany, what made her pick between this job and another one offered to her in the South of France. I am not quite clear what her relationship status is… but I am enjoying reading about her life. And I do hope she can get back to the shop and get that toilet seat. That is awesome. I give her a 4 on the scale, and look forward to reading more.NULL