River Days

Downtown Cairo, Illinois, once the stuff of
Steamboat legend.

There have been a lot of changes lately.  A new apartment, Anya heading back to DC to start her new job, a new semester (with new classes, meeting people I didn't know last term).  Even the Arabic I'm speaking is different because I have to get back in the habit of speaking a standard Arabic after spending the last month doing nothing but speaking Egyptian (and reading the standard).

I've taken another visit to the Delta town mentioned in my last post.  I will be going again this coming weekend, if God wills it.  I'll also be reading a novel, something I've done before in Arabic but never before in a single week while also doing other work.  It will be interesting.

Things are pretty quiet right now, though things are supposed to start heating up between now and Friday with big protests planned for Friday.  The government is still cordoning off the central piece of land in Tahrir and cordoning off bits and pieces of other areas, so the protests will start outside Tahrir and then... well... we'll see what happens.  I haven't been following much in politics recently, absorbed in my life and its changes (as are, really, most people in Egypt, it seems to me).  That is, perhaps, one of the stranger things about revolutions... it's not really what most people are talking about (though, of course, January was presumably a different story).

In the meantime, I'm dumping some links and some music about the Egypt region of Illinois, which inspires several lyrics and titles in Josh Ritter's album "The Animal Years."  I was reminded of those lyrics when I read this little article on Grant, whose Western years I don't recall hearing much about in the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War... most accounts of that war from a "generalist" perspective focus on the eastern seaboard, but it was interesting to read this piece and to remember just how crazy important rivers are.

So from my Nile to yours, here's Josh Ritter "Monster Ballads."

"I was thinkin bout my river days/
I was thinkin bout me and Jim/
Passing Cairo on a getaway/
Every steamboat like a hymn."