Y’alla Ayala

It’s inevitable. When you spend a few days in another country (or any other place that has a different language/dialect), you get used to hearing another language being spoken. At first it’s real annoying since you can’t understand anything everybody says, but after a while, you pick up a few words yourself, and at least in my case, I get interested enough to learn more and more words in that language. I am far from a language expert, I can only speak two languages fluently (and those are the very boring English and Filipino, which are both languages spoken in my country anyway), but I’d definitely learn another language if the opportunity arose.

My Mom and I spent a good 8 days in Egypt (or was it 9 days? I really can’t remember), and during that time, although the tour guides we spoke to and the friends we were with all spoke English (and Filipino), we still heard a lot of Egyptian Arabic being spoken around us. One such word that kept being said was “Y’alla”, which according to our tour guide meant “Let’s Go” in Egyptian. It’s usually said many times continuously, so as to make it sound more urgent, i.e. “Y’alla Y’alla!”.

A lot of people said it, tour guides mostly (and there were a LOT of tour guides scattered around), for obvious reasons. It’s probably one of the words that most tourists understand, and there’s even a travel agency there called “Y’alla Tours”. I saw that name painted on a van.

Anyway, while we were there, it was almost automatic for us to move whenever we heard it. It was quite fun, really. And it’s the only Egyptian word I really remembered. I got so used to it that the day after we got back to the Philippines and I took the bus to go to work, when it stopped at the station I was supposed to get off at, and the bus driver announced the station, I thought I heard it again.

“Y’alla! Y’alla!”

I turned my head sharply to look at the person who said it, expecting to see someone in a turban and a long-sleeved shirt, thinking for a moment that I was still in Egypt and the people around me were speaking Egyptian. But it turned out to be a very Filipino-looking bus driver in a white polo barong and black slacks. And I realized that what he said was not Egyptian, but in fact the name of the place we had stopped at:

“Ayala! Ayala!”

I laughed at myself as I got off the bus and was laughing the whole time (I know I probably looked crazy to the other people around) I walked to the next place that had another bus to take me to my workplace (yes, sadly, the Philippines is still full of buses and not enough trains). How funny language is.

Taking Life As It Comes

I’m sure we’ve all experienced things not going according to plan, especially in traveling. Flights get delayed, bagagges lost, emergencies come up, and a lot of other things can happen that can upset us whenever we’re traveling. Sometimes, even the smallest things can ruin an entire day’s itinerary– malfunctioning coffee maker, broken water heater, etc. When these things happen to me, the usual result is that one of the spots we’re supposed to go to gets cancelled. Or maybe we’ll go to a nearer, less interesting place instead. This has always upset me and made me feel bitter about not seeing something I’ve always wanted to see. Although, my recent trip to Japan has made me reconsider my opinion on these little mishaps that happen. Aren’t the unexpected events the things that make life interesting, after all?

The plan was to see Tokyo City from the top of the Metropolitan Bldg. It’s a government building so going to the top is free. According to my mom who’d been there some years ago, the view from the top is really nice. We’d already come from Harajuku and Chinatown and it was pretty late, but figured we could still go up because it supposedly closed at 9PM. So despite our being tired, in fact my parents were no longer able to come with us (we’d been walking the whole day) and they just stayed at the nearest Starbucks instead, we still went. Mostly it was to take long shots of Tokyo at night time. We’d already seen the city from the Tokyo Tower, but it was daytime when we were at the tower, and we wanted to see the city in a different light.

After a few minutes, we reached the lobby of the building, and there was a sign on it. It was in Japanese of course, but my friend who was with us who is Japanese, Yumi, was of course able to read it. And she told us what it said:

CLOSED FOR THE DAY.

The schedule on when it would be open was written under it. And the earliest that it would open would be the next day, when she (Yumi) was no longer available, and we (my siblings, parents and I) already had other places to visit in our itinerary.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know that they closed on holidays,” she apologized. We told her it was okay, and then we just laughed about it. We looked at each other then with the expression ‘What now?!’

We were standing at a sort of plaza in front of the building. There wasn’t anyone else around since it was already late. From where we were standing, the Metropolitan Building looked really good — it was lit from the bottom, and it glowed against the black sky. We were there anyway, and we had nothing else planned for the rest of the night so my brother suggested we take pictures. And this is the result:

Metropolitan Building in Tokyo behind us: (L-R) Me, my brother, Yumi, my sis

On our last night in Tokyo, we went up the Roppongi Tower and saw Tokyo by night from the top of that building. I guess it all worked out for the best because not only did I eventually get to see Tokyo by night, from the top of a building, but we got to take that really cool picture as well. I for one, haven’t seen anyone who’s visited Tokyo who has a picture like that. Although the point isn’t really that we have a unique picture (I’m sure there are others who’ve taken pictures like it, and I just haven’t seen them). I’m happy that despite things not going according to plan, or perhaps, because things didn’t go according to plan, we were able to see something different, and experience something different.

Truth is, that picture-taking session was one of the most fun activities for me for the time that we were in Japan. We thought of all these crazy poses and kept laughing at ourselves for going to a building that was already closed. And we didn’t feel embarrassed looking silly because there was no one else around. I think it was the best way to end that day, especially since it was also the last day that Yumi would be touring us around since she already needed to prepare for her classes the day after. I guess sometimes, things work out really really well, despite not planning anything, despite not being prepared… Or maybe it’s especially because things weren’t planned, and we weren’t prepared, and that’s why life gave us a nice surprise.