Avenue of Sphinkes! Or, the Kebash Road?

Long time no see, I know, and I'm sorry. Everything here has been pretty dead recently, but things are starting to look better than for a long long time.
I've been lurking on the TripAdvisor Luxor Forum, and saw a thread about walking the Avenue of Sphinxes between the two temples, and thought I'd go and take a couple of pictures, just so that you'd know for yourselves how the workers are doing.
These few shots were taken yesterday, at the last major break in the Avenue, just between the Emilio Hotel and the old Telephone Exchange, at the bottom of Yousef Hassan Street. It looks as if they could make the last few connections at any moment, the only problem would be where they are going to put all the traffic! The current system sends the Northbound traffic along the Eastern side of the Avenue, to cross over at the large Coptic Church, whereas the Southbound passes the same Church on the Western side, on Sharia Karnak, then crosses over to the Eastern side at Yousef Hassan Street. I think it's eminently possible that both of these cross-overs will be closed and all the traffic will have to cross on the inner ring road which lies between King Salman Square and Abu Jude.
Anyway, here are the pics, as usual if you click on a picture they'll all come up bigger:-

This one's taken from the Emilio side, Luxor Temple is away to the left, and that's the old Telephone Exchange on the right. The next one, looks towards Karnak. The Savoy Market on the extreme left and the Evangelical Pentecostal Church in the centre.

As usual, they're not messing around with flimsy foundations, I believe that these are for a wall which will rise about 2 metres above the ground, the phrase "over-engineering" comes to mind, don't you think?

This one has the Savoy Market off to the left, out of sight.

They do make me laugh at times! The floor tiles on our roof terrace are becoming a bit uneven and many are cracked. The reason? "Not enough sand beneath them" came the reply from an experienced Egyptian tiler. You could have knocked me down with a feather; he obviously hadn't gone to Sunday School and sang about the man who "built his house upon the sand" and how it "fell down" when "the floods came up and the rains came down"! And then they use so much steel and concrete for a simple perimeter wall?

Here we are again, this time looking towards the fibre-glass Emilio on the extreme right:

You cannot accuse them of not getting stuck-in, it seems to me that they're "Knocking doors out of windows" (A Tyneside euphemism for doing a good job). Mind you, rumour has it that the whole lot is to be finished by some time in March, they'll have to pull their socks up!

By the way, that's not a spelling mistake in the title, Egypt doesn't have an "X" so they aren't used to pronouncing it.

Now that I've broken the ice, so to speak, I might, one day, even get around to telling you about the recent developments at Our Luxor, you never know!!!!



No comments:

Post a Comment