(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.)
OH MY GAAAHHHHD, I accept this heap of laurels! Thanks very much — I would love the VFYW book (though I assume it will cost a small fortune to ship to New Zealand).
I’ve had a very challenging month, between our cat trying to die on us and requiring two surgeries within two weeks, work shit, and life shit. The life shit has been literal, as I had my first colonoscopy, like a responsible adult, on Wednesday. If anyone is procrastinating, just get it done. The prep is the worst part, but the drugs are amazing.
Minnie the cat is now recovering and on a lengthy cage rest. Although she is now suffering from “cage rage” and attempting constant jailbreaks, attached is a photo of our tiny treasure in a restful moment. I know you guys are more dog people, but you’ve got to love those speckled toe beans:
All of this is to say, this contest win is a massive bright spot for me this month. Thanks again.
Thanks for the speckled toe beans! Last week, the always-excellent email from the Alaskan globetrotter slipped through the cracks:
The tourism activity that most people associate with Tonga is swimming with the humpbacks, but I’m not sure I can endorse this with my eco preface. The pressure on local guides — no matter how local, nor how conscientious — to get viewers close to marine wildlife just seems to invite too much corner-cutting. I’ve seen this firsthand with dolphin viewing in Lovina, Bali, and I observed things from a professional perspective with orca viewing around Washington’s San Juan Islands and a boat-based, polar bear viewing off Kaktovik, Alaska (no longer allowed, but that story is very complex). Researchers have documented the same sorts of problems from humpback swimming in Tonga, at least for the most popular island chain (Vava’u).
If your need to swim with the big whales overwhelms your conscience, at least consider going to a lower-use location, such the smaller operations on ‘Eua. The Rock Garden on ‘Eua has some of the highest elevations in the Tongan islands, along with classic South Pacific beaches:
‘Eua seems to be the most scenic and best ecotourism option from other perspectives as well. Just a few hours by a ferry from Tongatapu, there are several small villages with moderate to cheap accommodation. Better yet, there is good hiking, climbing, snorkeling, and the usual beach-combing and relaxing. (Contrast that with the 12 to 24 or even 36 hour ferry journeys to more distant islands like Ha’apai, Vava’u, or Niuatoputapu.) If you want to be eco and go to those places, best save up for a sailboat and cruise there yourself.
I predict 60 correct guesses — if they get Tonga, they will get the location (if not the precise window).
Remarkably close: 59 sleuths got to Tonga. One of them — a film professor outside Boston — has some cinematic additions:
This January, Tongan film was big news at the Sundance Film Festival. Lea Tupu’anga (Mother Tongue), directed by Luciane Buchanan and Via Mafile’o, was screened to much acclaim. It’s extremely rewarding and important to see Pacific Island filmmakers getting recognition. Here’s a great interview with the director:
You might also enjoy this short film, The Legend of Kava Tonga:
Malosi Pictures produces many films from Tonga and the Pacific Islands. Especially notable is For My Father’s Kingdom (Vea Mafile'o and Jeremiah Tauamiti, Tonga, 2019):
And here are some films shot in Tonga that do not necessarily celebrate the heritage or culture of the island — or, for that matter, do much to celebrate Tonga at all: Tongan Ninja (Jason Stutter, New Zealand, 2002); Somewhere in Tonga (Florian Schewe, Germany, 2017), and When the Man Went South (Alex Bernstein, Tonga/US, 2014).
I actually started this email on 4/19 as soon as I saw the photo — it’s been sitting in my drafts folder now for 12 days — so I hope it’s not late. Hopefully I at least got the right island!
Here’s a followup from the “average super-sleuth in NYC”:
Sometimes I am amazed at what the VFYW community digs up. I thought the Hiko documentary that Berkeley found was incredible. If there wasn’t visual evidence, who would believe that every girl in Tonga learns to juggle?
So here’s my juggling story. Back when I was a little kid, my dad moonlighted as the on-call doctor for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at the old Boston Garden. Before each performance, we would walk around behind the scenes and chat with the performers. When the jugglers practiced, I would just stare at them thinking they were the coolest.
Finally, one time they showed me how to juggle, which I can still do with some proficiency. Although I have to say, juggling is not a particularly useful skill, and the local girls definitely did not think it was a cool thing to do. Only the girls in Tonga. But even they laugh at guys who juggle.
P.S. Thanks for using my photo from Tel Aviv in last week’s podcast post. It was taken the week before Iran attacked. I imagine the beach wasn’t so crowded the following week.
One more followup comes from the super-sleuth in Providence:
I NEVER woulda guessed Tonga, so I didn’t even try, but I’m surprised nobody brought up a song that’s an old favorite from childhood: Flanders & Swann’s “Songs for Our Time.” The “foreign phrase” portion of the song makes fun of typical 1950s pop-tune conventions. It’s utterly unplayable nowadays, one supposes, as it would seem to Gen Z to be irredeemably colonialist/imperialist in origin and slyly referential, akin to the “rape culture” theme in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”:
In any case, onward! I’m very much in appreciation for all that you and Andrew do to keep the Dish conversation intellectually stimulating, engaging, provoking, and multifarious.
Onward to this week’s view, a previous winner is getting vibes from Emerald Isle:
I’ll try a quick reaction (though I’ve never been to Ireland). Very cloudy. Looks like a European city. Not too wealthy, but perhaps gentrifying. Brick buildings with some copper roofs. A church. The number and style of street lamps. Green grass, bushes and trees, and park benches. Notably a canal and perhaps some light-rail tracks. I think it’s Dublin.
From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:
For this week’s VFYW Reimagined, I started out with an expressionistic take on the VFYW, focusing on the building in the distance:
Then, having recreated a facsimile of the submitter’s photo, I made three more versions of the VFYW Reimagined: an ink wash effect; an oil effect; and a watercolor effect. Here’s the latter:
From a previous winner:
I’ve run out of time to attempt this contest, but I’m convinced it’s somewhere in the north of England. The sign in the bottom-right says “Reserved Parking,” so it’s definitely an English-speaking region, and the whole view screams English city with canals, especially with the converted red-brick mill on the right. It could be Staffordshire, or Manchester, or Birmingham, or Leeds, or some other Midlands/Northern town … I don’t know.
Our super-sleuth in Japan also thought northern England — at first:
A very happy all-the-May-holidays to everyone … we are currently celebrating Children’s Day here in Japan!
I took one look at this week’s VFYW and felt a huge rush of nostalgia for the area I grew up in — the North East of England — and I felt almost sure that I recognized it as being part of Gateshead or Newcastle, which border the River Tyneto to the south and north, respectively. I went to school in Newcastle but lived further south of Gateshead, so I passed through an area that looked very much like this view on a regular basis: large red-brick buildings adjacent to churches. The sky is really reminiscent of a northern English sky, and the rubbish bins (trash cans) and seating also seemed somehow familiar.
Here are a couple of images from Gateshead and Newcastle, around where I initially thought the photo might have been taken:
However, a couple of things gave me pause. Firstly, it looks from the arrangement of the traffic lights as though the photo is taken somewhere people drive on the right; and secondly, there are piles of snow around, which would nowadays be very unusual to see sitting on a street in the UK. Despite the north of England being at latitude 55°N, the Gulf Stream (and global warming, probably) keeps it from being particularly Baltic most of the time. This made me think we may be looking at somewhere more prone to snow.
Therefore, I started looking for redbrick buildings in Canada, which in turn gave Montreal (where many photographs, are — somewhat controversially, I feel — labeled “Scottish red brick”... lol). Or possibly it’s Toronto. I’m fairly sure you can see a church down the road in the photograph, so I spent some time looking at “Montreal churches” online, but didn’t score a hit this time. I don’t know these areas at all, but I know enough to know they’re pretty large, so I’m just going to label this email as “Montreal” and leave it here.
I wish I had more time, as the canal and the apparent railway in the foreground of the photo are probably clues that are worth following, but if I start down that rabbit warren I will not be prepared for the classes I have to teach tomorrow!
The super-sleuth in Bend gets to the right country and region:
The “Reserved Parking” signs mean we are in the Anglosphere. This looks like an old, small, post-industrial city in the northeastern United States.
A sleuth in St. Louis writes simply: “Middlebury, Vermont, USA.” Another goes with Burlington, VT: “I’m not confident in this, but I desperately hope it’s true so I can learn more about the world’s tallest filing cabinet.” Atlas Obscura has him covered:
My wife and I have two little kids, so we are going to use that as our excuse this week (and every week until our children have left the house) for a rather lazy effort in the VFYW contest. My wife, a bit of a snob, had this first reaction: “Looks kind of shitty .. maybe Baltimore ... or Scranton.”
My first reaction: “Looks like home!” I grew up on the Delaware River, and all of the towns between New Jersey and Pennsylvania had this look: telephone poles with big electrical boxes, brick brick brick, copper roofs, steel guardrails rounded at the end, streetlights with three bulbs, big blue waste bins. I could be wrong of course, but I’m going to run with a hunch. So picking a town a bit at random, I’ll guess Phillipsburg, New Jersey.
The bird’s-eye view from Chini:
Giuseppe, the super-champ in Rome, teases the right city by identifying one of the buildings:
Harder than I first thought. I had pinned my hopes on the copper roof of that prominent building you see in the distance (now I know it’s the Landmark Building, formerly known as the Odd Fellows Building … BTW, “Odd Fellows” sounds like an apt name for the VFYWC sleuths). But I couldn’t find it until I stumbled upon the place almost by accident.
Another tease with a few more buildings labeled:
I’ve got to say, this one had me stumped for a day. I was thinking definitely New England, definitely a small- to mid-sized town or city, and it most definitely has that light industrial/textile town sort of feel to it. Ware, MA? Lowell, MA? Manchester, NH? Connecticut? Vermont? All possibilities. In fact, too many possibilities to start simply plying the streets, rivers, and rails to find the correct fit.
Happily, I found a way in and it proved to point me to the correct city. Then there was the simple matter of finding the correct building, and the thornier matter of finding the precise window. From a bit of triangulation, as seen here:
A previous winner gets down to street level:
What’s Dusty hiding? A sign for Enterprise Bank, pictured below. You’ve also nicely blurred out the sign for USA Chicken & Biscuit — though based on the Street View photo (with the café in the background) it looks like they’ve moved:
The super-champ in Berkeley also deciphered that bank sign — and it was the key to his success:
Right away this wintery brick downtown brought to mind Worcester ex-armory from contest #373, so imagine my surprise when that window and this one turned out to be only 38 miles from one another. The drive between them takes an hour.
I can think of three previous contests where bank signage was an important clue, although with the previous three you deployed Dusty to get in the way. Those three were contests #353 (Logan, UT), #355 (Tunkhannock, PA), and #372 (Honiara in the Solomon Islands). Happily, this week’s bank had more than one sign and Dusty could only block the larger of them. You opted to blur the smaller sign. I couldn’t read it at all, but the general layout of the words was still perceptible, and something in the conventions of bank sign design makes them recognizable for what they are, regardless of how illegible someone has tried to make them.
So it came down to identifying a banking institution in New England whose signage has white lettering on a green field, and which has a yellow logo of some sort centered above the bank’s name. That turned out to be Enterprise Bank, which is a tiny chain (thank God) that has only 27 branches, none of which are found outside of Massachusetts or New Hampshire. And all of which are neatly listed along with their addresses on the company’s web site. It then became a simple process of elimination and ours was the 20th in the list.
A previous winner names the right city:
I had a visceral reaction to this view and instantly recognized it.
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