Since the opening of national borders at the beginning of the 1970s, Egypt has become an emigration country, with millions of labourers setting off each year for the neighbouring countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. However, difficulties to settle in there together with the density of migrants’ transnational networks push Egyptians to return to their home country after sometimes decades spent in the Gulf. Being such a huge and continuous phenomenon over the three last decades, the round-trip to the Gulf has become a central part of Egypt’s national imagination. Hegemonic discourses, whether coming from the intelligentsia or from the state apparatus, tend either to praise returnees for the potential economic rewards they can bring to their home country, or to incriminate them for the “alien values” they are thought to carry along. Knitted within a dense structure of institutional constraints, and pressured by ambitious but ambiguous social expectations, migrants’ experiences remain highly equivocal. Based on a two years' ethnographic fieldwork with returnees from various social backgrounds in the city of Cairo, my contribution will focus on return migrants’ narratives. Insisting on the strict “material” change that migration have triggered in their lives, Cairene returnees do partly legitimize the dream a self-made success offshore. Nevertheless, ethnographic data also helps illuminate the ordeals and sufferings linked with the huge disruption of routine and certitude that travel entails. Travel indeed creates more space for reflexivity and for negotiation within the normative behavioral repertoires of migrants and their families. Confronted with a growing diversification of references available, circular migrants experience ambiguous evolutions of their social ideals and practices, whether on gender, religious or economic issues. How do they manage to combine these apparent paradoxes in their life narratives? What is the social impact of these cognitive and practical changes at the collective level? Such are the interrogations to be addressed in this contribution.