Ramses marching...
As I'm writing now, our King Ramses II is finally making his way to his new home in Giza.
I posted before on the rehearsal, which was successful, but now is the BIG DAY! The statue was scheduled to start moving by 1am, and is expected to arrive at the Grand Egyptian Museum by the Giza platue in 7 or 8 hours (depending on the traffic?). There was a previous report on postponing the move to 6 October instead of 25 August, coz of Israel's war on Lebanon. With the ceasfire, I guess the govt decided to go ahead with the original schedule.
I went to check out the square in the afternoon, and spoke with some ordinary people as well as engineers involved in the project. Most said they were for moving the statue, to escape the bloody pollution. But they were all sad Ramsis Basha would be around no more. I heard lots of jokes, as expected, on how the Se3eedis (Upper Egyptians) will be lost now when they arrive in Cairo's central train station. The statue had always been the main placemark for any non-Cairene.
I took some pix of the statue earlier in the afternoon. You can find them on my flickr account. You can also find a slideshow, by Nasser Nouri, of the previous rehearsal that took place on 27 July here.
UPDATE: Nasser Nouri kindly shared some of the pix he took of the King's march. I uploaded them to my flickr account.
I posted before on the rehearsal, which was successful, but now is the BIG DAY! The statue was scheduled to start moving by 1am, and is expected to arrive at the Grand Egyptian Museum by the Giza platue in 7 or 8 hours (depending on the traffic?). There was a previous report on postponing the move to 6 October instead of 25 August, coz of Israel's war on Lebanon. With the ceasfire, I guess the govt decided to go ahead with the original schedule.
I went to check out the square in the afternoon, and spoke with some ordinary people as well as engineers involved in the project. Most said they were for moving the statue, to escape the bloody pollution. But they were all sad Ramsis Basha would be around no more. I heard lots of jokes, as expected, on how the Se3eedis (Upper Egyptians) will be lost now when they arrive in Cairo's central train station. The statue had always been the main placemark for any non-Cairene.
I took some pix of the statue earlier in the afternoon. You can find them on my flickr account. You can also find a slideshow, by Nasser Nouri, of the previous rehearsal that took place on 27 July here.
UPDATE: Nasser Nouri kindly shared some of the pix he took of the King's march. I uploaded them to my flickr account.