VFYW: Everyone's A Winner

For contest #465, a VFYW first: nobody gets the prize.

(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 the winner of last week’s contest:

Amazing! Thanks. I'll take the two years of Dish membership please. Give my best to the team there, and keep up the good work.

Here’s a followup from our super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:

Last week I should have thought to include a link to the book Malls Across America by Michael Galinsky. He first came to my attention as the bassist for the ‘90s indie band Sleepyhead, then later as co-director of a quirky fake-doc called Half-Cocked, which starred a bunch of people known to me and to pretty much anyone else who was in the indie rock scene then — aaaaaand no one else. But he recently promised/threatened to republish his coffee table book of mall photos taken on a cross-country trip in the ‘80s. It’s long out of print, but you can get a copy on Amazon for $1,381.15.

Here’s the CO/NJ super-sleuth with a recent submission that’s way too hard for the contest:

Chris, it’s so cool you introduced your niece to skiing. It’s such a great sport and such an awesome thing to do with family and friends. You will have many years of enjoyment with her ahead of you.

I just returned today from two weeks of skiing — last week with my family in Summit County, CO, and the week before with some buddies in Alta. We had 38” of snow the last two days we were in UT — some of the best skiing of my life. The group is a bunch of ski race dads (and a few sons) that all met and ski at Blue Mountain and get together every year for an epic ski trip.

I attached a VFYW candidate photo, taken from the main floor lounge of the Alta Peruvian Lodge, where all 15 of us were staying:

This is a very classic, old-school lodge that anyone who is an avid skier undoubtedly has heard of or stayed at. These could be extremely challenging for the non-skier set, as there is really very little to go on. Yet they are apt to be instantly recognizable by anyone that has skied Alta.

Also attached is the actual window circled on a stock photo — the yellow square:

If you have your own submission for the window contest, please send it our way: contest@andrewsullivan.com. Be sure to include part of the window frame, and horizontal pics are strongly preferred. If you can, please include a photo of the window circled, as the sleuth did above. If your submission is selected, I’ll give you six free months of Dish.

On to this week’s view, the Intrepid Couch Traveler panics:

CRAP!!! I forgot to enter the contest. I lost track of the week again. Damn, I have to get a less comfortable couch.

Looks tropical. Looks like interesting brutalist architecture in some developed tropical paradise. My brother loves to go hiking in Costa Rica, so let’s go with that — specifically San Jose.

From the beginning of Berkeley’s entry:

This week’s view had a lot of stuff in it, but not a lot to go on. A few palms and air conditioners, but not enough of either to indicate much. I see fugly multistory concrete buildings built closer to family homes than zoning laws in my neighborhood would ever allow (especially that monstrosity with the unadorned windowless wall, looking like its developers planned to build the other half but ran out of money). The mostly white-walled houses in the neighborhood look fairly well maintained, except for their Spanish- and/or barrel-tile roofs, which all could stand a little attention. And what’s with that massive hangar over on the right?

Here’s the view from Chini:

Here’s a wild-ass guess from the super-sleuth in Riverwoods:

Antananarivo, Madagascar? OK, I fully admit this is a WAG, but it was all I could come up with based on the type of palm tree that I assume is in the foreground.

Our super-sleuth “way out west” takes a pass this week:

No effing idea. I’m looking forward to reading the solution.

Naming the right continent is our super-sleuth in Austin (who almost always creates a cocktail inspired by the location):

Nice challenging contest this week. I was pretty sure we were in South America at first glance, given the foliage, and the fact the houses have both chimneys and AC units. Also, the white brutalist buildings reminded me of similar buildings in Buenos Aires.

That being said, South America is big, so it did take quite a bit of Google magic to locate the specific buildings in the photo. I finally found the tall building with the vertical stripe on the left side of the photo in [city and country redacted].

No cocktail this week, as I’m on vacation for a couple more days, but I’ll be back on track next week — hopefully. Have a great weekend.

You too! Our resident chef also takes a breather from an original creation this week, but he names the right country:

We took a break from VFYW dinners this week. The call of a Memorial Day barbecue with ribs and corn was too strong to resist, even with the temptations of cuisine from Paraguay. Many Paraguayan dishes also feature meat and corn, so it’s not a complete departure:

The real star of our meal, once again, was a dessert creation from daughter no. 1 — a delicious rye flour upside down cake made with fresh strawberries and mulberries from our garden here in Asheville. The rye flour gave it a mellow flavor, perfect with the soaking of berry juice.

We also made a Fjord Fairlane from contest #463, with a spicebush-flavored vodka from the local distillery Eda Rhyne (which has come back after suffering five feet of water in the storm). We are a bit constrained for cocktail ingredients here in Asheville because North Carolina has state-run liquor stores, but I will try when it’s possible.

Here’s the beginning of the entry from our Brookline super-sleuth (who eventually got the right place):

The combination of architecture and vegetation in this week’s view had me thinking South America — someplace not too warm but not too cool. I thought maybe Argentina, and I found neighborhoods in the coastal resort city of Mar del Plata where such roofs with red tiles and chimneys seem to be pretty common. Not quite right, though.

I turned to deciphering the scrawled writing on the building near the middle of the view:

I figured it must be some kind of hotel, but my early guess of “aspbrothel” was not helpful. (A house of ill repute catering to a serpentine clientele?)

Here’s the deciphered writing from the CO/NJ super-sleuth:

This week, the crux clue was the script signage on the tower in the center distance. I thought it might be a red herring — similar to the Bank of America logo last week — since it was left unmolested by your Dusty cartoon. I was worried this was going to be another Montes Claros, from contest #352, but the signage was the real deal, and it saved me hours of fruitless searching through South American metropolises. Admittedly, it was a bit hard to make out, but once I figured out it spelled the word “esplendor”, a quick Google search revealed the logo of Esplendor by Wyndham.

This brand of Latin American hotels includes only nine locations, so it was quite quick to nail this one as the property in [city redacted], Paraguay.

The super-sleuth in Sydney has a different crux clue:

Look at this balustrade!

Then I realised how much this contest has dragged me in, because who in their right mind gets excited about a bloody balcony? Apparently me — and probably everyone who reads the VFYW.

Alas, I spent so much time searching that there’s no time for an AI podcast this week. I’m tipping only 30 correct guesses this week; it’s a toughie! Now I’m off … first night of no rain in Sydney for literally weeks, and it’s the start of Vivid, our winter lights festival. What started as tourism bolstering our low season has turned into frantic mobs of families marching the streets of our downtown area to get a glimpse of these lights. Wish me luck.

Here’s our super-sleuth known as the ski nerd:

The key clue for me was a Reddit post with the photo below on the left, observing that the building looked like a Playstation 5. It matches the building behind the crane in the view:

Regarding the building seen above, the “a-maize-ing sleuth” notes:

It houses the Embassy of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Incidentally, Taipei is almost exactly on [city redacted]’s antipode — its opposite side of the earth.

Our Alaskan globetrotter reveals the right city:

Tough one this week, and I’m out of time. I threw over an hour at this one and did not get far enough. Valya seems unwilling to help — it’s summer here, and there is too much to do. So we are going with a proximity guess.

Palms and other vegetation suggest South America, and the red tile roofs and not-quite-polished buildings do not tell me different. I think the key to the location is the arched-dome building in the back right, which looks like an enormous hangar or possibly a sports venue, but I struck out on that angle.