hala wallah, cheers!

for those of you who don't speak saudi english, my good friend and colleague at the business school, Yazid, coined my new favorite phrase. hala wallah, cheers! the queen's english is a bit of a mystery to me. it feels odd to be in a place where people are speaking english, yet i don't understand it all.

so perhaps we should all do as yazid does and integrate laguages--make up our own. i have noticed that Oxford--and the UK generally--is such a mix of cultures and languages that i wonder if people actually understand one another here. there must be a hundred dialects of english spoken here: saudi english, indian english, greek english, chinese english, amerrrrrrrkin english, french english/euro-english and, of course, proper british english. each is its own language, and i have to sit and think really hard every time i am speaking to a non-american, not to mention a complete FOB (of which there are many around these parts!). so to all i say: hala wallah, cheers!