As I walked up the wooden steps I looked straight ahead. I saw an old house painted yellow on the outside. A bunch of square umbrellas had been placed around the wooden patio with a table under each umbrella. A huge tree was covering the main area of the restaurant with a huge shadow. Each table had dim lights on them, and there was just enough light to be able to see where you were sitting but not enough to notice your surroundings.  
     We sat down, a waiter came to our table and our parents started ordering the food. As the waiter and my parents were speaking about the food, I looked around. I turned my head towards the entrance, and I see a short man walking up the steps to the restaurant.  
     He looked kind of familiar, and he spoke to his friend in a language that I understood. He was speaking Albanian. Then I realized, this was Xherdan Shaqiri. The football player who has played for Inter, Liverpool, and Bayern. The best player in the Switzerland national team. It was very cool seeing him. I turn my head back around to the table and continue talking to my family.  
     “Hey, hey, that was Shaqiri,” I said with excitement, trying to get everyone’s attention. I was just starting to get into football during that time so I got very excited. 
     “Who?” my dad said. (Can you believe this guy?!) 
     “Xherdan Shaqiri. He has played for Bayern Munich and Liverpool,” I said.  
     “Oh Ok.”  
     We ate, went to the hotel and slept. The next day we went around Zurich and saw the city. It was a very nice city. We went to a McDonalds for lunch and as we were ordering on the touch screen ordering system there, a McDonalds worker came and said, “Put on your mask”, in Albanian. It was very bizarre. Then after McDonalds, we took an Uber to a shopping street in Zurich and the Uber driver was Albanian. Then at a store on the shopping street, we met an Albanian family. On a 2-day trip to Zurich, we saw 6 Albanian people.  
     Seeing that many Albanian people has me thinking about the big Albanian diaspora. How those Albanians ended up in Switzerland, and if it was their choice, why were they in Switzerland? But thinking back I realized that in Albania there was a communist regime at the end of the second world war until 1990. People saw no hope in Albania growing and developing as a country, so they fled. But also, after the end of the communist regime they left because it was a country with no real government. Every politician was still corrupt, and the government would never work right. Even if they worked in private companies, which had no link to the government, the salaries would be horrible because the companies did not make enough money to pay the workers very well. So, the people had to make the very tough and hard decision to leave and to start a new life elsewhere. Many went to England; many went to Germany and Austria. But a lot of Albanian and Kosovar populations ended up in Switzerland. According to wikipedia.org, there is, in fact, over 200,000 ethnic Albanians in Switzerland.  
     One of the main reasons that lots of Albanians and Kosovars left Albania and Kosovo was because of opportunity. There was no opportunity in Kosovo or Albania, so they left. One example would be about jobs and salaries. Albania was a developing country with no economic prosperity. The jobs that were given were mostly government jobs and even private businesses that started made almost no money because no one had money to go around. Also, there was a very dumb rule that people could come and claim your property and legally you could not do anything about it. There was no government to battle this, so many people used that as a reason to leave. Without land to farm or without their shop, they could not make money. So, they left for Switzerland and could get an office job. This still happens today. People finish their education in Albania and then go for jobs outside of the country to get better pay.  
     Another example of no opportunity in Albania was the schools. As a developing nation, the education system was not very good. People did not want to send their children to schools that were not very good so they would move outside of the country to give their children a better education. This way their children could have the opportunity to go to good universities and then get good jobs. In Albania, this would not be possible because the education system was poor. This still happens today as people send their children to boarding schools or to live with distant relatives outside of the country and get their education there. Their child will then have the chance to become successful and bring money back to their family so their family lives better.  
     As I looked back on the trip, I kept thinking about different possibilities as to why each specific Albanian I saw in Switzerland, was there. I thought about the McDonalds lady and if she studied there, if she lived there with her parents, or if she had gone there after school. I searched up Xherdan Shaqiri and what happened to him. It turns out that Shaqiri was born in Kosovo but after he was born, his parents moved to Switzerland and brought him with them. His father worked different jobs, but the average salary meant that Shaqiri could pursue a career in football. Each person had their own different reasons why they had left their home country but all had one thing in common. They did it because there was no opportunity in their home countries.