Window to the world: 30 stunning views from homes around the world

What does a resident of New York or Dubai, Bermuda or a provincial English town see every day in the morning? Often this is not at all what we imagine: a backwater street instead of rows of skyscrapers, a grassy courtyard with a chicken coop instead of a pastoral picture. But now you can see how they actually live in different countries: look out of someone else’s window, listen to the sounds that come from the street and from the apartment itself, look at the streets of distant cities.

You can leaf through the windows on the website Window-swap – a mouse click opens a random window at a random point in the world. And now you are already in Dubai, listening to the landlord playing something elusively familiar from the classics on the piano. But look at the snow-capped mountains in Santa Barbara or the amazing sunset in Istanbul.

There are also Russian cities: the sleeping areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg, which do not look indistinguishable from each other, Surgut and Novosibirsk. They are easy to recognize: as if something elusive is in the air.

The views are static: the camera does not change its position. But the action itself is mesmerizing, like meditation. Here you watch the dog frolic on the lawn near the house in Georgetown, and now you watch the waves roll majestically on the coast of Hong Kong, the boat rushes briskly under the windows of a Stockholm apartment, or a cow grazes under the burned-out Maryland sky.

People walk outside the windows – you can see how they dress, how they behave, and as if for a second become a part of that foreign life. Maybe this occupation is so addictive because of the inability to travel in the era of a pandemic?

You can also upload a video with your own view from the window, become a part of this giant virtual journey. We have collected the most interesting views from the windows on the web: scroll through the gallery!