A few days ago, my husband and I were on the flight home from a long-awaited 20th anniversary trip. This post isn’t about all the things we did—fun as that would be to tell.

It’s about some of what I observed, and some of the conversations I had with taxi cab drivers and fellow bus passengers. It was, above all, a reminder to me that the world is still a big place, and there is still so many different perspectives.

I think many travelers—my husband and I, in any case—often wonder, when traveling, what the lives of the people who live in that place are like. We see what they see, and eat—mostly—what they eat. But day to day, what do their lives look like? What do they do after work? Are groceries expensive for them? What do they talk about with their friends? (This is the anthropology major in me, I know.)

But the other question I ask—and perhaps not as many travelers wonder this—is what my life would look like if I lived there. Would I still love the things I love as a visitor? Or would the things I love be outweighed by other practicalities: the cost of living, for example, or the length of my commute and the amount of free time I’d have. And, importantly, would the things I love about my “real” life be able to transfer to this other life?

It’s a form of escapism, I know, imagining life in a new place. But you may understand why. Our life at home has been so overshadowed by uncertainty and dismay since January 20. The new regime has affected very directly the lives of many we know, and it’s affected my work directly. So this trip, in addition to being a celebration, was so needed just to step away and, well, be. To see new things, to start conversations with strangers, and to spend some days away from our routines.

And it was a good reminder that for much of the world, especially outside our country, life carries on. The people we met still carry on doing the things they’ve always done, and finding joy where they can: whether that’s in telling funny stories, or enjoying a good meal with new friends, or appreciating a beautiful garden or landscape.

Because we live in the United States, and America’s actions ripple widely, the topic of politics did come up a time or two as well. In particular, two conversations, one about politics and one not, demonstrated to me the contrast between the country our administration wants us to be and the country that we actually are.

The first conversation was about colleges. Our driver was under the impression that everyone in the United States went to university after high school, and that public universities were automatically accessible to everyone. The private schools he’d heard of—Ivy leagues, mostly—he thought were accessible to anyone who could pay, and were specialized in something: law, engineering, etc. I tried to explain to him in my rusty French that, no, in fact, even the private universities tried to attract the most academically strong class they could, and they often enrolled students who were not at all rich but who showed a lot of potential and so attended on scholarships, etc.

As I was speaking, I realized a couple concepts were basic assumptions we make as Americans that may not exist elsewhere in the world. The first is the idea of merit. Students who show a lot of potential should not be limited in their opportunities by what they or their families can afford. They earn the right to reach for their potential.

The second is that that potential is limitless. American universities are arguably among the best in the world because they attract the brightest minds to work on the world’s most pressing problems, and the solutions those minds have come up with are, truly, incredible.

The second conversation was about politics. Someone asked me what I saw for the future of America, and my answer was that I truly didn’t know. The leaders of the country currently are trying to take us back to a time when power and wealth are held in the hands of very few (and those few happen to be white and male—I’ll say no more than that now). What is happening is obviously more complicated than that, but since I had to boil down my point to its essentials (time and language did restrain, after all), that would be it.

The two stand in stark contrast. On one hand, America has stood for a belief that people should strive to reach their potential (however great or small that may be) unhindered by the color of their skin or the chromosomes in their DNA. On the other hand, America has since the Great Depression fought against, and now is fighting for, the idea that in fact it is a small number of people who should hold the majority of the wealth and power, and decide the direction of the country.

It remains to be seen which vision of America will be adopted by the most Americans in the coming few years, but in the meantime, the world continues to spin, and those outside our country continue to watch us, but only to the extent that it affects them (think tariffs, as an easy example). Otherwise, they carry on with their lives.

One of the folklore tales we heard on the trip was of an elf who offered a solution to people’s problems, but the solution was often worse than the problem. It was a reminder to me that stories repeat over time; putting our faith in a promise maker (or snake-oil salesman—take your pick) often results in grief.

That perspective—that ability to remember always that we always have control over how we react to our circumstances, and that people have (mostly? often?) survived through oppressive regimes, as well as thrived through prosperous ones—may be the best souvenir I will have taken from this trip.