It had been 9 years I hadn’t stepped a foot in that country. When I came out of the terminal 9, they were all there; literally everyone. Their faces were priceless, they all seemed too excited to see me and my sister. It was like they were welcoming a president or some monarch. I didn’t know most of them, but of them knew me. My aunt Aisha almost in tears came first and started kissing us while talking about the last time she saw us when we were kids, then came my uncle Rasheed complimenting for how much I grew up, and finally a bunch of old women and cousins that I hadn’t seen before or simply didn’t remember greeting me with enthusiasm…. They were all so happy to see me; they were all asking me about how was my life in Paris and when could they come to visit me to go up the Eiffel tower and walk on the Champs Elysées with me. One of my cousins even started asking me if I had ever been to the PSG stadium before and if I had seen Ibrahimovic. You could clearly see they had never left Algeria in their life, and that it wasn’t everyday that they would meet a foreign relative. I knew all these people were really happy to see me and were simply being really nice, cause I couldn’t help not feeling awkward and kind of uncomfortable. I never liked it when people would “celebrate” me like that, I always loved being with people and I like when I interest them, but I always hated to have the discussions all focused on me and people being too happy for me. It was just like those horrible 30 seconds when your family and friends sing you the birthday song, and you are just there waiting for the awkwardness to stop. Then I started thinking what did I represent to all them, apart from just a nephew or a cousin that was coming back to the “bled” from Paris after 9 years. When we arrived at my auntie’s house, all the family had gathered to come and see us with my mother. I was watching my mother telling everyone about Paris, family, work and life in general. They were all staring and listening intently to my mother and then I realized, that us coming to Algiers for the week wasn’t simply for them a visit from a from a relative, it was also a glimpse of the world away from Algeria. My cousins never had the opportunity to travel outside Algeria except for maybe the holiday in Morocco; while me, last year I’ve visited 4 countries including freaking Thailand! It’s in those moments that you realize that you are really lucky to be in your situation and to be able to see the world; seeing the world makes you more open and more closed to stereotypes and fear, and above all they just make you smarter and happy.