(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.)
The super-sleuth chef / dad with three daughters (whom I just anointed with “super-champ” status for his uncanny ability to get almost every contest) reflects on the VFYW:
Last week was an especially poignant view for me. Thanks for creating this space where I can share my memories with a wonderful community. (I mean, siphonophores, who knew? I love the Milwaukee super-sleuth and her new animal beat!) I love all the super- and not-yet-super-sleuths, and the quiet lurkers, and the occasional random guessers, and the oh-my-fucking-god-I-was-there-last-weeks, and Chini and Giuseppe (OK, a bit jealous there), and the Berkeley super-champ’s ruminations on movies, and the history lessons from the super-sleuth in Warrensburg, and the postcards from A. Dishhead, and everybody who teaches me things I never knew about the places we visit, and all the other random motley crew you have assembled.
Indeed, I love how the VFYW over the past two years has developed weekly columnists — on food, cinema, music, animals, and history. If you have a particular niche you’d like to carve out — local beverages? notable art? famous denizens? famous murders? something way more creative? — please have it at.
On to this week’s view, a previous winner gets us started:
It’s so frustrating to get the contest right one week and then not get anywhere the following week. My clues this week were:
Church: Catholic country
Satellite dishes: facing forward should indicate northern/southern hemisphere, not equator.
Not many air conditioners but also balconies: a seasonal place
Some leafless deciduous trees but also some coniferous: a seasonal place
Very urban
Crazy building colors overall, sort of dilapidated
Hills in rear
With that, I wasted a lot of time in Santiago, Chile. Then I thought Argentina or Poland or France. But some of the window shades look like Italy, and I feel like you haven’t put used an Italy pic in a while, and Milan is probably a pretty traveled place. So that’s my guess — with no proof or window.
Not Milan. (And the most recent Italy contest was in Palestrina, last March.) Another guess: “Puerto Montt, Chile? Not sure why I think this.” From a sleuth in France:
For ages I’ve been missing deadlines for the contest (and was really annoyed last week because I had found Portland pretty quickly!), and I was about to do so again, but I remembered to submit an entry in the nick of time. I only have time for a quick zooming in on my phone, but on a hunch — between the minaret and the hollowed-out church spire, as well as the roofs and the big slab of a white building — I find that the view has a very Balkan vibe. Plus the hills in the distance. So I’m voting for Sarajevo.
On that note, I’m currently reading a novel/biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, as well as his last letters, so I’m constantly reminded that horrors are lurking quite close by for us in Europe. The film Quo Vadis Aida, set around the time of the Srebrenica massacre, was a powerful reminder:
The war in Ukraine is another tragic instance of this senseless blood thirst on the part of some men. But thank goodness justice eventually happens.
From a VFYW team:
Our instincts first took us to South America — maybe Brazil? Or the Mediterranean perhaps? I started looking at the foliage — deciduous trees, maybe right around springtime? We see a large fruit (pomegranate?) on the left, which feels Middle Eastern, but the leaves seem too large. Ugh. Were not finding much: no cars, no streets, no people at all — yikes, we’re in trouble.
The obvious church in the foreground — what about that distinctive window? We recurse down into lancet windows, gothic tracery, and yet still feel like we’re nowhere. The glass with water on it — rain? Oh, wait, we’re LOOKING through some glass too. Interesting but no help.
Then we look at that pair of white water tanks — not many rooftop tanks look like this (cylinders on side); most are cylinders stood on their flat end. Sigh. Maybe they’re propane? No, those all seem to have fittings centered, not off center. Again, we’re nowhere …
That team eventually got the right location. As did a married team, who documented their progress:
The 1st photo shows our very scientific methods. 2nd photo is our guess. 3rd photo in the lower right you can see the umbrellas for this restaurant. The 4th, 5th and 6th photos are all good guesses for where it was shot, but … they are not behind glass. 7th photo has the arrow pointing to our guess spot. 8th is another possibility, though I can’t see the VFYW image from this angle.
Of course we already won contest #248, so this is just for fun :)
The Berkeley super-champ was stumped at first:
You weren’t kidding, Chris, when you suggested that we might want to use a magnifying glass for this one.
This is what I meant, on the far right:
I had finely cropped the photo to nearly erase the tower, whose distinctive shape would have been a dead giveaway to most sleuths. But you can’t get anything past Chini:
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