As a registrar, I took part in a six-month exchange between the Maudsley Hospital in London and the Psychiatric Hospital in Barbados. My main motivation for taking up this opportunity was a long-standing desire to spend at least part of my psychiatric training in a less well-developed setting. My expectations were that Barbados would provide this kind of experience, with the emphasis being on service delivery in a very different cultural setting to which I was accustomed.