VFYW: Hung Like A God

You jelly? For contest #365, we also take a gander at transexual fish poop. What more could you want?

(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.)

Here’s a followup from the submitter of last week’s window:

Thanks for selecting the Lech photo — it’s heartwarming to hear everyone’s memories or research or speculation about such a lovely area. While Lech and the surrounding area is pricey, our Lech vacation is anything but. My German in-laws — never ones to spend more than absolutely necessary — have been visiting Haus #58 for well over 20 years (friends of theirs have a connection to the house going back 50+ years). It’s a very affordable rental whose owners balance the modern economic demands of the area with the multi-generational personal connections of all the renters.

The entire point of these trips is not to relax, but to hike. Every day. My three daughters have spent a week in Lech each summer since they were born, and while early on they did attend a kids camp or bike around town, that didn’t stop some days of hour-long hikes in the Alps with a stroller, chasing cows:

Many afternoons would end at the Waldbad Lech/Zug water park, where conveniently (remember, frugal grandparents) the entry price dropped from 10,00 € to 5,00 € after 2:30pm. An inexpensive activity-dinner was to catch fresh fish from the stocked pond at the Fischverein Lech fishing club located directly along the Lechbach stream in Zug (just down the road from the water park).

I think even the super-chef would be challenged to make these fish taste like anything but ... stocked fish.

One highlight last summer was to hike the Braunarlspitze to witness the sun rise. This meant a 3AM departure (hiking right from Haus #58), reaching the summit 4000' later just as the sun was peaking over the horizon — brilliant:

Thanks again, Chris, have a great weekend.

Our super-sleuth in Ann Arbor “was bummed to miss last week’s window”:

Searching for patterns of avalanche fences in Austria, my wife and I had made it all the way to Lech am Arlberg, and the right building, and then I was so irritated by a street address — Strass XYZ or Dorf XYZ — that I decided there had to be a bug in Google Maps. So I wanted to take a bit more time to look for a better map, but before I got to it, we were hit by the big ice storm and lost power, including phone and internet for three days. Thank goodness for a wood stove!

Next up, an entry from last week that I didn’t include in the results (and you’ll know why by the end of this week’s results):

P.S. Bonus picture of the week — Athens airport at 3.30pm today:

At first, I thought president Biden might be in town since he seems to be flying on a different bird this week. However, it turns out it was “just” Blinken.

Speaking of the secretary of state, here’s our first guess for this week’s view:

Odessa, Ukraine? No real reason — just a gut feeling. I think my grandfather came from around there. It’s in the news. I worry about it.

A super-sleuth breaks down the scene:

• On top of one of the rooves, there are solar-powered water heaters — of which I became aware in the contest window from Vietnam. As such, I associated them with developing countries, but the other day I saw some on the roof of a hospital building here in Kingston. 

• These water heaters would be facing towards the sun: south in the Northern Hemisphere; north in the Southern. 

• Those look like satellite dishes, but it is difficult to determine if we see the front or the back. It looks more like the front, but then they would be most likely pointing towards the equator, which would contradict the direction of the water heaters. Hmm. 

• The steeper the angle of the solar panels and the dishes, the further from the equator. The dishes seem to be perpendicular, so, far from the equator? 

• There are heat pumps hanging on the walls of many of the apartments. These would indicate a country that gets warm. I figure most developed countries would have central HVACs, so a warm developing country?  

• It looks like Christmas decorations reflected in the balcony glass. The trees look green, so it’s the Southern Hemisphere where Christmas is in the summer? 

• But one can make out three people on the ground, one of whom has a heavy-ish coat with a hood. The coat is open, but still, probably winter. 

• There is that yellow pennant with what I thought might be the German eagle, but, upon closer examination, I think not. That would be a key clue. 

Short answer: I have diddly. But several of my Google matches were from Kosovo and Montenegro, so I will flip a coin and say Kosovo.

Another sleuth settled on Montenegro:

That tiled roof in the front is obviously Ottoman, and maybe a church. It could be Greece. But there are minarets in the background. Which suggests this is the western Balkans. 

Where in the Balkans has mosques? Why Albania, of course — a Muslim majority European country. It also has a coast, unlike Bosnia (that tiny strip you’re thinking of doesn’t count). But does it have Ottoman-style churches? I am not sure. 

So maybe Montenegro then. And the church suggests somewhere close to the border with Croatia. It’s not Kotor. So it must be Herceg Novi, named for the same chap as Herzegovina. 

Another sleuth introduces a fantastic phrase: “This is a total hot guess, but is this week in Tenerife, Canary Islands?” Another island guess comes from our super-sleuth in Chattanooga:

My Lenten, Google-less gut call this week started with Barcelona, but this seems more of an island, so I’m tossing the Azores out there. I don’t know any islands or towns by name, though.

Chini does — along with the window, circled here:

Chini also knows what’s up with my editing:

One undersung part of the contest is the work Chris does to make the views gettable but not too easy. In this week’s case, that involves a rather amusing use of Photoshop’s clone tool in an attempt to hide the national flag pennant sitting just above Dusty’s paw …

Our super-champ in Rome, Giuseppe, bows to the VFYW god:

The building this week is the 51st I have correctly guessed in a row, since contest #315. Doug Chini did the same thing in 2014-2015: 51 contests in a row from #189 to #239 — here you can find what he wrote about reaching that milestone. As far as I know (I could be wrong), 51 is the all-time record for consecutive correct guesses.

To be fair, during his own streak, Chini managed once to be the only right guesser — a feat he repeated more recently in contest #270. I’ve never been able to do the same. He is truly the one grand champion of our contest.

Back to this week’s view, a sleuth narrows it down to two countries: