VFYW: Don't Get Tossed Out!

Watch your back for contest #405. We also find instruments of torture, wolfdogs, flesh-eating fish, Hitler, peeing sculptures and, well, buttholes.

(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.)

Calling all sleuths — a mission, if you choose to accept it:

I do not have a VFYW entry, but a small hope you could help me surprise my wife with reliving a happy memory. 

She and I took our first vacation together to Puerto Rico in 2008, when we were still in med-school. In April we are going back for the first time, with our two boys. The picture I keep on my nightstand is from that trip. She looks like a pixie in a yellow sundress. 

I would like to take her back to that spot. Back to the tree she was leaning on and showing me that smile I fell in love with. The VFYW contest inspired me to try my hand at finding the spot on my own. I could not.

Would you be able to ask the VFYW sleuths to help me locate the street we walked on? We stayed just east of San Juan, and I think the spot was within a few blocks of the ocean. We were walking back from the beach to our shoddy hotel room (the name of which has disappeared from my mind and email) when we stopped to take pictures.

Thank you for reading and considering this request.

His reply to my email:

That is wonderful. This is a real kindness. This is one of my happiest memories. I’ve attached the few pictures we took that day (and I used Photoshop to remove us):

I’m pretty sure both pictures are from the same walk down one street. I know that isn’t much to go on … fingers crossed.

Maybe our sleuths can solve this mystery by Friday, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The VFYW is often a place where sleuths help sleuths. An example from our resident chef:

Before I get to the food, I want to say that “The Layover Cure” is the best name for a cocktail the Austin mixologist has invented. And boy, did I need one this week. After a brief week of jet-lag recovery, I flew to New Orleans for a business meeting and spent two days trying to get home. This included a wait of three hours in the airport with no functioning toilets because of a broken water main. In recompense, I made the cocktail for the VFYW dinner, pics below. 

By the way, I’ve been following Cocktails With Suderman for over a year now, so I’m glad you mentioned the substack last week. I think Suderman should have a guest appearance with the Austin mixologist.

We should get his wife, Megan McArdle, on the Dishcast sometime — especially since she was one of the old-school bloggers at The Atlantic when Andrew and I were there oh so many years ago.

From a previous winner:

First off, I have to say that I actually won last week’s competition in a parallel universe. That particular cathedral actually does exist in France. I found it, and I’ve enclosed the picture along with a Google Earth rendering from a similar angle for you to confirm. It’s St. Maclou in Rouen, France.

But unfortunately, in our branch of the multiverse, that exact shot with the Trustees Executors building doesn’t exist. I’m content to know that my counterpart in the parallel universe is currently enjoying his victory.

Here’s the long-awaited return of the super-sleuth in Augusta, GA, who consistently makes me laugh more than any another sleuth:

2024 Greetings! It’s not too late to still wish you and Andrew a Happy New Year, is it? I’m of the opinion that anytime before, say, June is acceptable, provided you haven’t communicated with the person since the previous year. But I have noticed that many seem to have a hard cutoff after the first week or two of January, and get quite peevish about it after that. If that’s the case, then Happy Groundhog Day!

Things have been much too busy for me to participate recently, but I still love reading the VFYW each week. I particularly enjoyed the Halifax one. I can sympathize with the Warrensburg super-champ; on my final year competing in the Geo Bee, I made it to the very end of the state finals. Only six people stood between me and a trip to D.C. — and I blew it by not knowing the location of a certain aquifer. (I guess they really like aquifer questions, since you mentioned your brother got one.)

I won’t name the aquifer, because I, too, secretly hope that one day it will collapse into a sinkhole and drag the entire blasted state down with it. I knew the answers to the rest of the questions, so if it wasn’t for that stupid aquifer, I could have gone to Washington and made out with Bob Dole just like your brother did! (I’m pretty sure that’s what you said happened; I didn’t bother to re-read that part.)

Good thing Bob Dole wasn’t doing Viagra commercials yet:

Because I read Augusta’s email on January 29, a Happy National Puzzle Day to her and everyone else who plays our weekly puzzle!

On to this week’s view:

Since way back when you and Andrew had your blog and I had no kids, I promised myself I would not attempt another crack at the contest. It took entirely too much time, and now I have precious little of it. Yet here I am again. It’s like heroin (I suppose, not having actually done any). The pull is too strong.  

Anyhow, my guess is Lyon, France. I saw the photo and thought it had a French look to it. I then Googled “tower and church on a hill,” because I think I see one — over to the far upper-right — when I squint and stand on one leg. I hit results for Metallic tower of Fourvière, and Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière. Then I searched around for churches in Lyon, until I came upon a photo of Saint George Church of Lyon, which looked like the church in this photo. The photos also showed that the buildings across the Saone River may be the buildings seen in the distance in the photo.  

And that’s where I hit a snag. The labyrinthian streets did me in. I felt I was close, but the more I searched on Google Street View, the less certain I became. I did become certain that I had spent entirely too much time. So that’s it. I leave it to the masterminds who each week pick the exact set of pajamas and shoes the photographer was wearing as they snapped the photo from the precise angle of the precise room, etc. I’ll simply enjoy reading how their minds work. And I’ll vow never again to undertake the hunt myself ... until the pull becomes too strong again.

Another asks, “Is it Gothenburg, Sweden?” Nope, and it’s not “Budapest” either, nor is it “Skagen, Denmark.” Another writes, “My first impression upon seeing the view was Eastern Europe”:

Two different friends recently traveled to Croatia, and the red ceramic tile roofs sent me down a rabbit hole looking at at Croatian cities on the coast. I hoped to find the large, long building in the background. I assumed it was governmental, but I found nothing resembling it anywhere. I even swung around the Adriatic into Italy but soon found that was not helpful.

Another first impression comes from the wine geek in San Francisco:

Shiela doesn’t usually help me with these contests, but this week she scanned the photo and said it looked like Portugal. Actually, I had the same initial reaction. But then we both agreed that the architecture seemed to be, um, grander than what we recalled from Lisbon. So I thought maybe it was somewhere in Central Europe, e.g. Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic. The building in the far background looked like a castle of some type, so I searched for “Central Europe castle in city.” A blog popped up with 11 “magnificent” castles to visit in Central Europe and the castle we see is the second one listed.

Chini zooms out, then zooms in:

The grand-champion adds, “Our clue this week should be easy for long-time Viewfinders, since we find ourselves in the capital of a once great empire, one that ruled over the town my grandfather was born in (a picture of which I shared here previously).” A sleuth in Bend names the right city:

I haven’t guessed for a while, but I recognized Prague pretty quickly, so thought I’d attempt to sleuth out the window. About a half hour of searching got me to the correct hotel, but the window turned out to be another matter entirely, as you can't see it from the street, thus there are (to my knowledge) no real “Street View” pics of it. I could tell where in the hotel it ought to be, and in fact someone generously posted to Google a few pics looking out from what appears to be the room directly above the window in question. Didn’t really help me though.

He eventually got the right window. So did a sleuth in Andover:

Some views tell me nope right out of the gate, and it’s been a long run of those lately. But this week (as I morph into a couch troll, laid up with a herniated lumbar disk), the view told me maybe. So a little sleuthing (inSPIREd? aSPIREing?) brought me to Prague, the city of 100 spires. A little fiddling with the old Google Earth, and we’ve landed another satisfying view! There’s a specific thrill in locking in the address and window after all the searching: we’re addicts for it! Thanks for giving me somewhere fun to visit from this couch.

Feel better soon! Here’s the beginning of the entry from the Berkeley super-champ:

I normally hammer out several paragraphs detailing how one search method led to another to another to another until Success! Not this week. This week I started and finished with the teal colored steeple (though I learned back in contest #381 that copper and patina were better terms than teal to describe such things), and success came suddenly, unexpectedly.

I started by searching for images that matched the terms “copper spire Europe” or “copper steeple Europe” (hoping for a flukey shortcut that would spit out an image right away featuring that teal-colored steeple in our image, the one shaped like a traffic cone or a witch’s hat). But no dice. So I repeated the same search over and over, substituting individual country names for “Europe.” First the Baltic states. Then one after another of the countries in eastern Europe (because architecture).

And before long, Bingo! When I typed “copper spire Czech Republic” this image appeared (peeking out from amongst a ton of others):

A sleuth on the Correct Guesser list gets close to the right building:

Hi, it’s been a while since I had the time to do some searching. But I so enjoy this game and the weekly write-up, so it’s never too far from my mind. I think this week’s view is from the Appia Hotel Residences, in Prague, CZ. And if it’s not, I still totally want to go there.

The super-sleuth in Ridgewood gets even closer:

This week’s window is from the Czech Museum of Music located at Karmelitska 2, Lesser Town, Prague 1, Czechia.

But this week I’m here to talk about Peter Jackson, who wasn’t covered enough in last week’s contest. Many of the greatest directors cut their teeth making low budget horror movies such as Coppola (Dementia 13), Spielberg (Duel), Oliver Stone (The Hand), and Peter Jackson is no exception. I somehow recently stumbled across one of his early films: the “splatter comedy” Dead Alive (aka Braindead), which is available for free in full on YouTube and which Wikipedia calls “one of the goriest films of all time” and “a cult classic”:

I checked it out and found it quite hilarious, in part because it’s insane to think how this ridiculous movie was done by the Oscar-winning director of Lord of the Rings, and yet you can clearly see the talent and the inventiveness on display right from the get-go.

Next on my list is Jackson’s film prior to that one, called Meet the Feebles (also available in full for free on YouTube). It looks similarly deranged and also regarded as a cult classic:

Back to Prague and its spires:

The most helpful clue for me was the red roofs, surprisingly. My first thought was, “Oh, geez, a bunch of red-tiled roofs. Approximately 200 countries on the planet have an area like that.” But upon closer inspection, these weren’t red tile roofs you’d find in Spain. They just looked like red shingles.

A little time with Google had a few pictures of Prague popping up. I’ve never been to Prague. Are there any spires there? Oh, apparently Prague is known as the “City of a Hundred Spires.” Oh shit, I know what that means. It doesn’t mean Prague has a hundred spires. It means it’s really the “City of a Bazillion Spires — More Than You Can Count.” I already went down that rabbit hole last week, looking for spires, and I wasn’t even in the right country!

However, a more specific search for the Czech Republic and red roofs quickly turned up a picture of a spire that looked suspiciously similar, located in the “Lesser Quarter.” I was home free from there.

I looked around a bit for the history of these red roofs, but couldn’t find anything interesting. I hope one of the other contestants will come up with something!

FYI, I added that big Dusty cartoon to conceal the right window he circled, to keep the guesses going. This next sleuth focuses on another big clue:

I tend to only make progress on the more clearly urban photos, and this one was instantly obvious, on account of the distinctive view of Prague Castle in the distance. But where exactly? The buildings of the castle gradually slope downward from west to east, as it does in this photo, meaning the photographer was looking northwards. This gives us a rough search area on Google Maps. Pinpointing the location to the hotel was fairly easy using satellite view, thanks to the distinctive shapes of the garden furniture (three squares and a circle), which clearly stood out:

Another sighs:

Man, this was a tough one. Thanks to a planned trip to Prague with my sister and her family, who were living in Germany at the time, I was aware of the magnificent Lobkowicz Palace, which gave me the location of this week’s view. However, how in the hell am I going to track down the exact window in such an old, DENSE city???

This sleuth names the right building:

I will start be saying thank you for the free month subscription after you posted my entry for Arlington, VA. No more freeloading for me; I am now a paid subscriber, and it was the Saturday morning VFYW recap for Dunedin that pushed me over the edge. Really good stuff. This contest is going to become addictive ...

So, as soon as I saw this week’s view, I was almost certain it’s Prague, confirmed by a quick Google search. That was the easy part, but where in Prague? A nondescript courtyard with no identifying markers? Could be anywhere.