VFYW: Holy Cows!

For contest #403, we gaze through the pollution with pink-colored glasses.

(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:

The VFYW has been a really fun thing to discover, and I’m grateful for your work in making it happen! I’ll take the book-prize, please. And stop by Berkeley if/when you pass through, as it seems there are a bunch of viewfinders here …

“Viewfinders” is such a great term; I haven’t heard it used for sleuths before. A followup from last week’s submitter:

I was thrilled to see how many sleuths found our Hampton Inn window! Their facts and stories about the area were fascinating to read. Our daughter, who has lived in Arlington for almost a year now, has a new appreciation for her hometown — um, homecounty — and she will definitely be checking out that underground puppet store! 

Bring holy water. Especially if they’re shadow puppets:

On to this week’s view, a sleuth makes a prediction:

I’m going to guess 150 get the city, 100 the building, but fewer than 10 will identify the room or the window because damn, there isn’t much Google Street View here. I’m not one of the correct window guessers this time, but I’ll submit what I have because I’m both thankful to be within a few hundred feet again (for the first time in months), but also, being a previous winner, I’m no longer in the running for the prize.

Actually only 40 sleuths got the right city this week, but almost all of them got the right building. The super-sleuth in Bethlum starts with the most entertaining clue:

First I tried to find the Ferris wheel (looking decommissioned) on the right side of the photo. That was a wild goose chase. If someone has the story on that, I’d like to hear it.

Speaking of wild, here’s Team Bellevue with a startling view:

We send our regards this week, given our brief VFYW entry. But for a change of pace, here’s the LEAST belle view we had this week:

That is a 100% authentic “View From Your Doorway” of the fire escape in our offices. We all made it out safely (via another fire escape), but we’re gonna need to borrow some more wet-vacs if anyone has them.

Until next Fri … blub blub blub

Yikes. From a previous winner:

Well, it’s been over a year since my last entry. Yet, surprisingly, it only took about five minutes to solve this mystery. Upon finding the location, I sat in stunned silence at my impressive feat. “I AM A GOLDEN GOD,” I thought to myself. And then I realized this is probably one of the easy puzzles you throw out there every once in a while, so I’m guessing Chini got the correct answer two days before you sent out the picture.

Here’s the clairvoyant Chini:

One sleuth simply says “Pakistan.” Another gets the right country:

I immediately sensed India in this photo. The cattle in the foreground in the midst of the dense urban environs settled it for me.

A previous winner is also seeing cows:

I know it’s India, but that’s quite obvious. Probably Delhi, or Mumbai. I don’t have the patience to search for a wedding venue, or a cow pen, because I still have PTSD after the wine shop search in Paris — and I’m sure this week will be a similar experience :)

From the sleuth previously known as “your mediocre super-sleuth in NYC”:

Over the past several years of sleuthing, I have had intermittent dry spells lasting up to three or four months. But recently I have found 11 of the last 13 views.  So I googled what is better than “mediocre.” The gradations go: mediocre, average, good, great, superb, epic, and Chini. At the risk of jinxing myself, and with your permission, I’d like to upgrade myself to your average super-sleuth in NYC.

This week, thinking it might help me get find the right city, I googled “list most air polluted cities in India.” Check out the images in this horrifying article. In turns out our view is of a city that didn’t even make the top 20. We are doomed.

Here’s the photo for Delhi featured in that article:

Another previous winner:

A tough one! I first thought it was Japan, but my searches kept returning locations in India — but alas, no precise matches. The carriage-less Ferris wheel is a big clue, and finally I found this article about a festival in Hyderabad that has a pic of the wheel. Not sure that’s correct, though; it might be a portable ride that moves around to different festivals.

Anyway, best I got! 100% sure it’s India, 50% sure it’s Hyderabad.

The coin toss says it’s not Hyderabad. That city was also the quick guess from our Alaskan globetrotter, who is out trotting again:

We are heading to the airport for a trip to SE Asia, so we couldn’t play seriously this week. But I took a look and my two-second guess is someplace like Hyderabad. (Just for the record, if I’m within 500 km, I’ll be happy and know that we could have found it with some effort.) We’ll send some Views from our trip.

Yes please! Another gut guess: “Bhucho Mandi, Punjab 151001, India.” Another: “Colaba, Mumbai, Maharashtra State, India.” Going with “Marehra, Uttar Pradesh, India,” a newbie gets rhymey:

Here’s a little self description,
First-time player sans subscription,
Relying on my own decryption,
Since hubby says we can’t spend money.

The Bethlum sleuth asks:

Was this pic submitted by the super-sleuth from Eagle Rock who was in India looking for tigers? If so, perhaps I need to start keeping track of all the travel plans of the VFYW readership as a basis for clues! Or did you drop that fun fact in last week’s write-up on purpose?

I won’t reveal the method behind my madness. Another Indian city comes from the UWS super-sleuth:

So nice to have you and the contest back from winter break! As soon as I saw that red tent on the tiny screen of my phone, I immediately assumed it was a wedding venue in India, and that I would be able to find it. Come on: there’s a big RED Ferris wheel — seemingly under construction, since there aren’t any cabs attached. Plus a sign for a public school, which I was certain I’d be able to make out eventually.

But no dice. I cannot find that Ferris wheel, and I’m still squinting at that sign. Can’t find the silver dome. No luck looking at views from Hiltons.

Now it’s Wednesday night, with almost time for my weekly Zoom with my sisters (a nice habit since pandemic times), and I’ve got nothing but a large continent … well maybe the southern half, if those cacti-resembling plants are any indication. Unless it’s in Sri Lanka, of course.

My SWAG is Kerala, India. Looking forward to the suggested foods and drinks!

For the school sign, the San Mateo sleuth channels his inner Rick Deckard:

You provided an incredible clue with the red sign in the distance. Probably the sleuths with access to an NSA supercomputer had the answer immediately. If I’d decoded it sooner, I wouldn’t have needed to find the buildings. I’ve enhanced the sign a bit:

Here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in SF:

I was just about to give up after a long weekend chasing kids around and trying to figure out where in a country of more than a billion souls this week’s photo was taken. The most tantalizing clue — the “Maha___ Public School” sign on the building — was actually rather tough to track down for me. I have never visited India, so I don’t have much personal knowledge to draw on, and I assumed that we’re probably in Maharashtra, but that was a dead end.

A previous winner in Alexandria also focused on the school:

I'm guessing this week’s VFYW is Kanpur in India. The whole picture kinda screams India, so I thought it must be Bangladesh, or elsewhere, to throw us off track. But I could make out the public school banner a bit and googled what I thought I fuzzily saw. It came up as the Neha Public School in Kanpur … so I’m going with that. Wherever it is, they sure do love rebar!

Yet another stab at the school sign:

Udaipur, India? Just a guess. I’m out of time, and I’m sick, so that’s it. I tried to make out the name of the “Public School” but couldn’t. Maharere? Makarena? One version I searched for took me to Udaipur, and since that’s the hometown of my best friend from high school, I’m going with it.

The super-sleuth on Park Avenue clears things up with the school sign — and names the right city: