There’s a particular wonder in finally seeing a friend in their home country. Not in Munich or Tallinn or Thessaloniki, the neutral cities where he and I often meet as equal foreigners, but on the soil that shaped him.

This episode drifts into the night I met my friend Josef in Cairo, and how instantly, beautifully different it felt. One moment we were the usual pair of travellers who have been lost together on multiple continents, the next, he was unmistakably local.

I followed him through the hotel, hand in hand with him and Ayman, breathing in cloves from the kitchen, feeling not like a visitor but like someone being welcomed into a home. Before I even sat down, a gin and tonic appeared in my hand, cool, lime-sliced, exactly the way he knows I drink it, a gesture that carried years of friendship across cities and time zones.

There’s something moving in watching a friend step into their full shape on their own ground. The confidence, the ease, the language slipping into its natural rhythm. After years of meeting him everywhere else as a fellow wanderer, it felt like I was finally seeing the chapter of him that had been missing from all our other catch-ups.

Living abroad for decades, I’ve collected friendships that exist across borders and oceans. Most of the time, we meet in the middle, in someone else’s country. Seeing a friend at home reminds me how rare it is, and how deeply grounding. It completes the picture of who they are.

This story is about that moment, the heart-zing of realising that home is often a person, not a place.

Have you ever only known a friend abroad, and wondered who they are in their own country?

Where have you felt unexpectedly at home because of someone, not geography?

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