(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.)
Wow, thanks very much, Chris. I guess it was meant to be, since the Will Ferrell Eurovision movie was also shot in my home city of Edinburgh.
We went to Húsavík on our very first trip to Iceland in 2008 and were immediately hooked. From there we ventured into the remote Highlands in a 4x4 to the amazing Askja caldera, fording rivers on the way. Since then, we’ve been to Iceland five or six more times, sometimes as a stopover on the way across the Atlantic. (Another odd coincidence: after one of those stopovers, we headed to Boston and did a tour of New England, including a couple of days in Provincetown, where we saw a dozen or so North Atlantic right whales on a boat tour … you really have to do it!)
I totally agree with you about the baths at Mývatn — so good, especially on a clear day. There are loads of hot springs all over Iceland, sometimes just in a farmer’s field. (We got a copy of this book that gives the GPS coordinates of dozens of places to dip into after long drives.) I’d also recommend devoting some time to the West Fjords region. Some very good hiking and whale watching there, and amazing puffin-laden cliffs.
For the prize, I’d very much like the book, please.
P.S. Below are a couple of photos from our last Iceland trip, in 2021. The first one is from a helicopter skirting the eruption at Fagradalsfjall on the Reykjanes peninsula — an area that’s been erupting quite regularly since:
Here’s a whale feeding near the harbour at Hólmavík:
And here’s a puffin at Látrabjarg cliffs in the West Fjords:
Last week another prize of sorts went to the Berkeley champ:
When I saw the message from Amazon with its opening line about the Dish sending me a Netflix gift card, I laughed out loud. It’s really thoughtful of you, thanks! Eurovision et cetera had to be our inaugural watch, of course, and both Jeanne and I enjoyed the hell out of it. (Unfortunately, none of the movies for this week’s location have turned out to be on Netflix, but I’m sure that’ll change in the coming weeks.)
We couldn’t let our film critic go without Netflix. By the way, one of the many things from my Iceland trip that I didn’t have room to mention last week was stumbling upon the Jaja Ding Dong Bar & Eurovision Exhibition, which includes a small museum for the movie. Right next to the bar is the tiny row of elf houses featured in the film, and tourists are encouraged to leave gifts:
Here’s the scene where those homes appear:
Another followup comes from a previous winner:
Wow! Multiple of my pebbles showed up in last week’s write-up. I feel a warm glow of accomplishment. (But I must eat humble pie for ever thinking Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was a documentary.)
Was it an oversight that you didn’t actually include the view of the Húsavík wooden church that appeared on the Accidentally Wes Anderson website?
I was really impressed by the angle of this photograph, because in the VFYW the church is so obviously situated smack-dab in the middle of town, on a busy street corner with the entrance surrounded by concrete and paving stones. I was sure the rural setting had been photoshopped in. But no, the photographer did actually find a vantage point down along the waterfront that completely hides both the street running in front of the church (those steps aren’t the church’s steps) and basically the entire town.
It wasn’t an oversight to leave out that church photo; I just wanted an excuse to plug “Accidentally Wes Anderson” again, since I have a few photos of my own that fit the bill … from the small town of Stykkishólmur:
From the previous winner “way out west”:
Sounds like you and Rae had a fantastic trip to Iceland! It’s one of the countries my wife and I would like to return to. Maybe someday!
Do it! The super-sleuth in Ridgewood has a few musical shout-outs:
Since the Iceland contest is still fresh, I’m feeling there is a bit more to say on the music front. First off, Sigur Rós! The atmospheric post-rock Icelandic band is known for lyrics in a made-up language, and it’s one of the more unlikely bands to be big enough to headline Madison Square Garden.
And then there’s the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who sadly passed away at the age of 48 in 2018. He was a two-time Oscar nominee for his brilliant scores for Sicario and The Theory of Everything, but I especially love his haunting score for the Nicolas Cage cult classic, Mandy.
Jóhannsson also wrote / directed / scored a fascinating adaptation of Last and First Men by the great British sci-fi novelist Olaf Stapledon. Truly one of the more tragic losses in the arts in recent years.
Sigur Rós was one of my favorite bands from my college days, and I introduced their music to Rae on our 40-minute drive from the Mývatn Baths to Húsavík during the most amazing sunset we saw all week.
In response to last week’s dissenter, the UWS super-sleuth has a great suggestion:
Oh, the humiliation of finding the right hotel last week, but identifying the wrong town — especially after claiming that the View was “easy.” Sigh.
But I do want to comment on the sleuth who wrote in to complain that the weekly write-up is TLDR. Too long for whom? Speak for yourself, dude! Many of us look forward to all the fascinating info and stories — in fact, those are as big a lure as the answer to the View.
So don’t let one impatient reader cause you to cut back on the contributions, Chris. If you feel you must do something, you could always put a link at the start of the intro to take impatient readers right to the solution at the bottom of the page. Or, novel thought, let them hit the END key on their keyboard. Problem solved!
Thanks! As for the first suggestion, I would have to update the post with a link right after publishing, but the email version of the post wouldn’t have that link, so I’m not sure how useful that would be to readers just looking for the solution. But the second suggestion seems much easier — though the instructions from UWS only seem to work on a PC. On a MacBook (which I use), you can press the “fn” key (in the lower-left corner of your keyboard) and then simultaneously press the right-arrow key (in the lower-right corner), and voila!
On to this week’s view, a previous winner in Tahoe writes:
When I first looked at the VFYW I thought, “Damn, Chris went for a twofer. He flew from Iceland back to Dulles, ducked into some hotel and snapped a photo.” Granted it’s been decades since I was at Dulles, but the bland, in-the-middle-of-nowhere feel to the VFYW brought Dulles to mind.
Making the view even blander is the super-sleuth in San Mateo:
This week it took me less than five minutes on Friday to identify the building from which the VFYW was taken, and it was the round skylight that was the tipoff. So, for the VFYW Reimagined, let’s see what we have if we remove the skylight:
Not so easy now, huh?
From a married team who’s won before:
Across the street is a USPS building ... or at least I surmise, given the trucks in the garages and the loading docks. But I didn’t find time to find a USPS building with a skyway. But it looks like Pennsylvania. Sort of.
The super-sleuth in Albany gets to the right region:
Start by presuming we are in a hotel. The covered walkway and vegetation suggests a colder northern climate. Several large buildings are in the background, but not a lot of high-rises, so not in a large city, but maybe near one. Walkways from hotels usually go to malls, parking garages, or convention centers. I feel like walkways from hotels to malls are usually in downtowns, and the lack of high rises nixed that, so next guess was a convention center. Mostly flat terrain, so we’re in the Midwest?
Yep. From the previous winner in NYC who had a baby last week:
Hello again! Somehow I managed to find the time to track down this location between feedings. Our view overlooks an adjoining convention center, a luxury hotel (for the lightly blurred “Loews” — which, for the record, is not a hardware store HQ building), and what looks like an air-traffic control tower.
Interesting contest this week, in that it rewards functional thinking. The architecture makes it seem like we’re looking from a hotel, but what would be connected to a hotel by walkway and have bus parking? Easy: a convention center. So it’s a matter of tracking down American convention centers.
He named the right one, as does this sleuth: “The Donald E. Stephens Convention Center.” Here’s some visual perspective from a sleuth in Bethesda:
In the far distance on the right you can see the Rosemont Theater, looking over the rooftop of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. Here’s an overhead of the direction of the view:
From the beginning of the entry from the super-sleuth in Brookline:
The flora and overall drabness of the landscape suggests the northern US, and my first thoughts went to the various office parks I’ve encountered over the years. But the rounded glass building seemed unusual, and the faint reflection of a bed in the VFYW window and the skylight dome got me thinking more along the lines of a hotel with a modest domed atrium. I searched Google in vain for hotels with cylindrical towers and skylight domes that are relatively small and plain (though I now understand why I kept getting pics of the Westin Bonaventure in LA).
Then I noticed the flag on the left side of the view:
It’s mostly white, and it struck me that it could be a state flag. So which states have flags that are mostly white? Illinois, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island:
It’s indeed one of those states, and this sleuth names it:
This was a tricky contest. Right off, the car tags and general architecture are giving off USA vibes. Then the loading docks. There’s enough of them that, in connection with the rather drab-looking building across the way, I was thinking of a truck-loading facility. But why would a truck-loading facility have a skybridge to what looks to be an office building? And why would you need a parking deck nearby?
So, after looking at the totality of the circumstances, I realized that I was likely looking at a convention center: they often have loading docks; they need nearby parking lots or decks; and they’re often connected to hotels.
Next, I remembered my unending love for flags. The one in the lower-left corner I assume to be a state flag, looking to be either Illinois or Massachusetts. The foliage and topography were looking more Midwestern than Northeastern, so I decided to stick with Illinois.
Our Illinois view makes another sleuth think of a very different place:
Figuring out the window here reminds me of that contest somewhere in an Arabian desert mall from that sphere of windows in the sky. (FYI, googling an archive of previous contests by cities yielded an archive list with a gap between 2015 and 2020.)
The Daily Dish retired in 2015, and the Weekly Dish didn’t launch until 2020, hence the gap. As far as the “sphere of windows in the sky,” our sleuth is referring to contest #287 in Riyadh.
The super-sleuth in Sydney hints at the right location this week:
I’m pushed for time this week, so I haven’t spent much time finding the exact window. But finding the location came back to the first rule of VFYW: if in doubt, start from an airport. In this case, a mighty big one.
The mighty big view from Chini:
Our previous winner in Yakima names the right city — well, technically a village:
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