A friend of mine did a gap yah before uni, spent six months living a village in Nepal teaching English as the school. Well off the tourist track, pretty much never saw another white person the whole six months apparently. Did a bit more travelling afterwards, back to Blighty to start uni. For the third year of the course she had to do a year in industry and got randomly allocated to work at Air France in Toulouse. I was also on a placement in Toulouse, and a crowd of us used to drink at a particular bar.
One evening a random Asian guy walks up to her in the bar and taps her on the shoulder. Turns out it was one of her former pupils in Nepal. He’d done well and won a scholarship to study in Europe, and had ended up at Toulouse Uni, which was just around the corner from our local.