Exchange Diaries: The World Through a Bay Window
- Jess Chuen
- 21 hours ago
- 3 min read
Jess, our Food and Travel writer, shares a heartfelt reflection on her exchange year in Nottingham, United Kingdom, and how nine months abroad reshaped her understanding of travel, home, and growing up.
It didn’t start with glamour. It started with a surreal five-hour coach ride from Heathrow to Nottingham, exhausted but wide-eyed, hauling my luggage through a messy first day. But somewhere between hunting for duvets with my new housemates and figuring out the heating, I accidentally built a home.
If I were to map out those nine months, I wouldn’t use a calendar. I’d use the view from the huge bay window in my room. That window was my emotional anchor. Facing the street and a row of trees, it framed my world. It was where I sat when I was manic with deadlines, where I sat when I was homesick, and where I watched the seasons bled from the rust-coloured leaves of autumn into the stark white of winter. I still remember the first snow; the streetlamps caught the flakes in a way that made the whole road glow, a quiet magic that I watched, mesmerised, from behind the glass.
By waiting for the 34 in the rain, I explored Nottingham until I knew the streets inside-out. And so, I pushed further, to outside of Nottingham and the UK. The UK railway service was a chaotic teacher: it taught me that the most convenient way to travel can also be the most heartbreaking when tickets are cancelled at the last minute. Yet, without those trains, I wouldn’t have made it to London for The Phantom of the Opera at His Majesty’s Theatre. As the chandelier rose and the music swelled, I felt a dream finally come true from the usual audio clip I had played on loop for years. The crashing chords of the overture gave me goosebumps that didn’t fade until I was back on the midnight train to the East Midlands.
But if Nottingham was my home, Norway was my greatest dream.
I visited Norway twice, and it felt like visiting two entirely different planets. The first trip was to Tromsø in mid-March. It was a battle against the elements: freezing winds and a landscape buried in white. It was beautiful, but harsh. Just two months later, in May, I returned to the same country, this time to Oslo. The transformation was shocking. The freezing cold was gone, replaced by a gentle warmth. The snow had melted into lush greenery, and the city felt alive in a completely different way. Experiencing the same country in two polarising states shaped my thoughts about the nature of constant change, in both the world and us.
However, living abroad is a discipline of contrast. We became tactical experts at the weekly grocery sessions (cursing the £1 to RM5.5 exchange rate back then). The absolute non-negotiable were the best of the most sacred Lidl bakery section: chocolate twists and butter croissants. There were hours spent at Wollaton Park which was only a fifteen-minute walk away, sitting on benches with beers, watching the deer graze as the sun faded.
In those moments, the stress of the ‘unknown’ would occasionally melt away. It was a looming anxiety about the future, the quiet heartbreaking of knowing this temporary escape had an expiry date and the fear that the version of myself I had become here would simply vanish once I returned home.
Strangely, my fondest memory isn’t about a castle or a monument. It was the George Green Library at 5:00 am, walking home with my friends after pulling an all-nighter during mid-sem. As the sky turned into a dusty grey-blue, I realised the point of ‘exchange’ wasn’t just the stamps in my passport. It’s about finding comfort in the uncomfortable and the resilience you build when you’re forced to grow up in a foreign postcode.
I used to think of ‘travel’ as an escape and ‘home’ as the reality I would eventually have to face. But as I watched that final British summer sun set in 2025, I found that travel is actually the process of proving to yourself that you can survive the unknown. Nottingham started as an ordinary dot on a map but looking back at that bay window, it became the place where I truly grew up. I’m not returning as the same person who boarded that coach at Heathrow. I came back knowing the reality can be just as magical as any journey, as long as you keep the window open.
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