AS WE settle into the cold, long, lonely winter with few plans to travel, consider making window-swap.com your “globe-trotting” companion. A quarantine brainchild of Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, a young couple who currently live in Singapore, the site lets armchair travelers peaceably gaze at the view through hundreds of windows world-wide. Watch the traffic roll by in a leafy São Paulo neighborhood, peek at a stonewalled backyard in Guéret, France, study the rustling treetops in Saint Ives, Australia, or spend a few minutes with a watchful cat in Chicago (or a Shih Tzu in Kuala Lampur).
The site launched in June with 16 videos, each one a view out the window sent by far-flung friends. The pair has now received more than 10,000 submissions from around the world. Aiming to provide “a little break from the Covid blues,” the couple can upload between 70 and 150 a week and have heard from teachers using the site to teach geography and from a hospice workers using it to divert patients. Intentionally simple and free of ratings or likes, the site offers an antidote to the dopamine rush of the click fix, and the surprise of how unexpected the world really looks. In our current straitened circumstances, swapping windows encourages daydreaming while reinforcing one of travel’s most enduring benefits: the realization that new prospects are indeed almost infinite.
