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.