VFYW: Another Big Win For Democracy

For contest #352, we bounce around one of the biggest countries.

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

From last week’s winner:

Fantastic news! I remember back in the day, being so intimidated by this contest, I never gave it a shot. But I guess recognizing that the world is less complicated than you thought is one benefit of aging, for better or worse.

A followup from the super-sleuth in Milwaukee about the cryptic wording on one of the buildings:

I can verify that “Allah” is used for God in the Gideon bibles in Indonesian hotels. I traveled there with a nun, and we spent an enjoyable evening trying to translate a Bahasa Indonesia Bible, aided by the fact that we both knew the opening of John’s gospel by heart. We segued into memories of Jimmy Carter learning languages by reading the Bible and a recitation of “The Pirate Don Dirk of Dowdee.” But anyway, “Allah” was used throughout that Gideon Bible. 

I was also interested to read about the mass killings in Indonesia a half-century ago. While I was in-country, I read a book about these killings claiming that many of the participants had been coerced into their actions in order to make them complicit. It also went over the role of the village associations, but it didn’t mention the US government :(

By the way, Krakatoa fans can find the best dramatic reenactment, for my money, here:

Somewhere in my photo albums I have a picture from the airplane showing seven or eight active volcanoes in Indonesia. At one of the country inns we stopped at, they had an eagle in a cage and told us it was soon to be part of a great ceremony to propitiate the local volcano by sacrificing one of every local animal :(

My favorite religious event, though, was stopping at a mountain shrine to Durga. It was halfway up a very narrow, windy, and busy road, at a spot where people going around the curve too quickly often spun over the cliff. So a shrine to the protective goddess was erected at the viewpoint, and people now stopped and prayed to her and no longer drove over the cliff.

And here I thought I had nothing to say about the VFYW last week, because I had not visited Jakarta!

As for this week’s contest, it was a doozy for sleuths. Various brief guesses included:

• Cincinnati, Ohio

• Grebe NSW Australia

• Hanoi, Vietnam

• Lisbon, Portugal

• Lagos, Nigeria

But the vast majority of guesses got the right country: