CAIRO - The wonderful royal wedding of Prince William to his lover Kate Middleton has enchanted the world, including Egyptians. The wedding was the sixth biggest online event in history, with statistics revealing that global Internet traffic was at its peak at around 1.30pm, with 5.3 million page views per minute. People thronged Facebook, which reported 74 updates a second. During the ceremony, there were 268,777 mentions of the wedding on Facebook in the UK alone. The event at its peak was mentioned 67 times a second on Twitter. Almost 10,600 allusions to Middleton's dress were recorded among UK users during the ceremony, with 4,583 comments on Sir Elton John's singing. "By the time the newlyweds emerged for the procession to Buckingham Palace, the number of mentions by users around the country had hit 1,199,196", the Daily Mail quoted Facebook as saying. Egyptians watched the event on satellite channels BBC English, MBC, Saudi-based TV Al-Arabiya and local English-language channel Nile TV, while commenting on it via the social-networking sites. The commentators spoke highly of the love story, which ended in their marriage. “It's nice to get married after this long love story,” they said. Most commentators also compared Kate with Princess Diana, William's mother, who was killed in a car crash in 1997. Diana was a member of the British royal family and an international personality as the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, whom she married on 29 July 1981. Their wedding, which was held in St. Paul's Cathedral, was televised and watched by a global audience of over 750 million people. The marriage produced two sons: Princes William and Harry, currently second and third in line to the thrones of the 16 Commonwealth realms, respectively. There were mixed views about the Kate's dress. Some women commentators said it was better than Diana's and even argued that “Diana was more beautiful than Kate in everything”. Others described Kate's wedding dress as “simple and nice but not wow”. A lot of people were critical of Al-Arabiya news channel for covering the royal wedding. “Are you only concerned about the royal wedding, not about the tragic events in Syria?” one person wrote on the Al-Arabiya page on Facebook. Another wrote: “I think that the hot situation in the Arab world is more important than covering this event.” “I don't care about this wedding. I care about what's happening in Egypt. I think Egyptians should learn from England, which has made a lot of money out of tourism because of this wedding. They know how to make money. I hope we can do likewise,” said someone else. One commentator suggested Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf invite the happy couple to honeymoon in Egypt, “in order to promote tourism here”. “Shall we call this the ‘Friday of the Wedding'?” asked another, given that many demonstrations and celebrations have recently been held on Fridays in Egypt and other Arab countries, for example the ‘Friday of Victory' and the ‘Friday of Anger' in Egypt. There are light-hearted comments like one commentator wished that Egyptians were back in the good old says of the Egyptian monarchy, when the royal weddings here were so wonderful. “Of course we would have done it better,” he wrote. Another commentator regretted that he'd missed out on watching the royal wedding on TV “because of a power cut”.
