(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.)
Amazing. Although this must be one of the furthest proximity wins I can recall — at 967 km, or 601 miles! I guess it’s fitting that I’d win for the “Hawaii of China.”
It always amuses me when I hear about the other Hawaiis. Okinawa, Madeira, the Azores, and the Canary Islands have all been called the Hawaii of their respective country. Russia has its own Hawaii — Cape Hawaii, located on Wrangel Island — but with average lows in January at -10 Celsius, doubtful anyone will book a resort vacation there.
So I’m going for the VFYW book, since I have a nice coffee table in front of my own epic view waiting for it.
I hope he sends us a photo of that epic view with the VFYW book in frame.
Here’s a followup from our super-sleuth in Bethlum:
Last week was another bust for me, but I suppose I can take solace in the fact that I spent most of my time looking in Shenzhen, so I wasn’t too far off. There was probably not a ton of public art of the type I enjoy to discover, but still, as penance I’ll offer this statue of Guanyin from the Nanshan Buddhist Cultural Park in Sanya:
And this dragon statue from Yalong Bay:
Congratulations on your new house in western MD! My college roommate was from Bethesda and her family had a place on Deep Creek Lake, where she loved spending weekends. You can always stop at the hot springs in Berkeley Springs on the way to the panhandle! (My condolences on the move; it’s always stressful.)
Deep Creek Lake was the first place I ever water-skied, at age 10, right after moving to Laurel, MD. Berkeley Springs is actually just 15 minutes from the new house, and my first out-of-town date with Rae was at their hot springs. Also, I was the best man for a friend whose wife is from that charming historic town, where the wedding was held. The heavy rain that fell that day had a silver lining — well, a multicolor one … two in fact:
Congrats on the new place in western Maryland. It sounds idyllic — and a welcome antidote to the hubbub of DC. When I lived in DC, I used to cycle out west on the C&O canal path, and though I didn’t make it to western Maryland, even the part I cycled was beautiful and relaxing.
Moving is so hard. Shiela and I just upgraded to a much nicer apartment in the building we live in, and although the change was good, I’m still recovering from the move. Actually we aren’t completely moved in, so “recovering” is inapt; “suffering” is more accurate. Which partly explains my absence from the contest recently — but I enjoyed reading about brutalist architecture in the Asunción contest, the creepy necrophiliac count in Key West, and the Hawaii of China.
Speaking of the C&O Canal, it’s less than a quarter mile from the house! There’s actually a 28-mile bike trail there — the Western Maryland Rail Trail — that runs right along the canal, which also parallels the Potomac River. It’s the perfect excuse to finally buy a nice road bike.
Next up, the “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor:
Aboutlast week’s puzzle, I agree with other sleuths that a major reason that China is difficult for the VFYW is the sheer number of similar-looking buildings, poorly categorized images, and the extreme speed with which new cities are built. Just look at this photo I took from my flight over China in the fall of 2023:
For tough views like Sanya, we will need the combination that Giuseppe referred to as “some doggedness and much, much luck.” A more poetic version, I think, is by David Grann, who wrote in his book The Wager the following sentence (about a British naval navigator): “At night, dizzy and haggard, he read the stars to fix the ship’s latitude; during the day, he estimated its longitude through dead reckoning.”
Or, as told by one of my classmates when I was in school: (the secret of success is) elemental craftiness and persistent dumb luck.
David Grann, you may recall, discussed The Wager on the Dishcast two years ago. Here’s our super-sleuth in Augusta, GA:
I definitely feel more like a remedial sleuth than a super one these days. I actually found some time to work on last week’s view, but the best guess I had was “China, maybe???” — which was correct, but, wow, those types of views really show who the S-tier sleuths are, don’t they?
From a new S-tier sleuth:
Wow! What an honor to be named a super-sleuth! I live in DC, but I know “the super-sleuth in DC” is already taken, so I suppose we could go with my neighborhood, as in “the super-sleuth in Brookland”?
Out of curiosity, how many super-sleuths are there now? The DC area seems like a hotbed; I can recall DC, College Park, Chevy Chase, and Alexandria, and maybe there’s a suburb I forgot.
Currently there are 77 super-sleuths. The one in Sagaponack is “following up on the architecture super-sleuth’s entry about Robert Moses’ legacy”:
There is a great documentary that the Lincoln Center recently helped produce on the “urban renewal” that led to the creation of the Center: San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood. It has great footage of the neighborhood that was the setting for West Side Story and was razed for Lincoln Center, Fordham Law School, and Lincoln Towers. Well worth watching.
It’s hard to feel like this was a totally evil project, because Lincoln Center is truly a jewel, but there was a cost. To their credit, they just announced a new plan to update the park and west side of the campus to better mesh with the neighborhood. Maybe a reasonable balance between perspective and wokeness?
Yet another followup comes from our super-sleuth in Sydney:
I was close but no cigar on Sanya last week, but I do have a story. We lived in Hong Kong in the early 2000s and decided we needed a beach holiday. Being intrepid, we decided to try Sanya, since it was the start of the Chinese government marketing Hainan Island as their equivalent of Hawaii. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t)
We arrived at our hotel, which was a Hilton or Sheraton — something generic and opulent, with a strange mix of patrons: plenty of Chinese, but a good number of Russians (think polyester tracksuits, gold chains and a lot of plastic), Indonesians, and Thais. The hotel aspired to Western-style service, with an emphasis on aspiring.
On arrival, our toddler complained of an itchy head. Any parent knows what that means: lice. We had a quiet word with the lady at the front desk, but her limited English, our non-existent Mandarin (we tried our very basic Cantonese but no dice), and being the ancient times before Google Translate meant we were in trouble.
Eventually the Australian deputy manager came out. We asked him if we could arrange to go into town to buy some lice shampoo. Turns out the hotel was miles away from the city and there were very limited transport options, because you’re there for a beach, not a city. Not to worry, our Aussie friend said, I will arrange for someone to get it for you.
Not long after, we are walking to the restaurant for lunch (youngest with a shower cap on), only to walk past a wall of photos of stunning looking women in bikinis. Unbeknownst to us, Sanya has been home for the Miss World competition, and candidates had stayed at our hotel. Suffice it to say, this Dad was very, very happy to take their kids to breakfast every morning while letting Mum have a sleep-in.
Contestants perform during the Miss World Pageant final opening ceremony on December 4, 2004 in Sanya, on China's southern resort island of Hainan. Miss Peru — Maria Julia Mantilla Garcia — won the contest. (China Photos/Getty Images)
Anyways, we finish lunch, head to the pool and the staff find us to say they have our “medicine”, so I walk with them to reception to pick it up. I am handed a small bottle wrapped in black with a skull-and-crossbones on it. After much hand gesturing and with limited communication, finally someone explained that lice shampoo was not a thing back then in Sanya. The enterprising team at the pharmacy gave us DDT-filled pesticide instead!
Suffice it to say, we went another route, which involved international shipping, more mixups, and the shampoo arriving literally as we checked out a week later. Good times!
One more followup comes from our Burner super-sleuth:
I had a blast working on last week’s window and this week’s. The difference? Days spent in failure vs minutes in success. I initially thought the Sanya window would be relatively easy given the outdoor pool and running track, slanted roofline buildings plus two other buildings with what I thought were unique identifiers. Boy was I wrong!
Like many others, I landed in China pretty easily. Knowing there are a ton of mega cities in China that I’ve never heard of, I started with Wikipedia’s list of largest Chinese cities by population. I started at 50 and worked up.
Sanya is #149 on the list. Even if I had gone up to 150, I still wouldn’t have found it. The Yazhou District where the picture was taken is too far to the west from Sanya. Oh well, it was super fun — and frustrating!
This week’s window is almost the opposite, in that little clues yielded oversized results.
On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from the Albany super-sleuth:
It looks European, Northern but not Scandi, Western but not frou-frou French. To narrow it down, I used the small blue sign visible at the bottom center:
Turns out, it’s to designate a “Living Street” or residential area — or, in this case, the end of such street.
Here’s a guess from our super-sleuth in Riverwoods:
It’s always disappointing to get close but not get the VFYW. I know it’s Germany because I located the little blue sign and its meaning:
Indicates the end of the traffic-controlled residential area, in German verkehrsberuhigten Bereichs. Vehicles leaving these areas must yield to all traffic.
However, that’s as far as I could get. All the other clues I searched were dead ends. So I’m going with this city on the Rhine: Cologne.
From the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:
Our first reaction to this week’s view: Oh my God, this looks so German (and not in a good way). Turns out we were kind of close, but still wrong. The architecture — with postwar modernism on the left, prewar middle class residential on the right, and the dreadful 1970s high rise across (it’s not a Chinese monopoly) — all could have perfectly fit a midsize German town on the lower Rhine.
The blue traffic sign in the foreground — signaling the end of what Germans call verkehrsberuhigter Bereich (literally: area of moderated traffic; Wikipedia translates it as “living street”) — seemed to prove us right, too:
Although in hindsight, we should have realized that it’s not the German version of the sign, but rather:
In these areas, there is no separation of vehicle traffic and pedestrians, so the speed limit is walking speed (5km/h, ca. 3.5mph). Foot traffic may not be impeded or imperiled by vehicles, and takes precedent over vehicles. And foot traffic is allowed to use the entire width of the street. It’s a wonderful concept — originating in the Netherlands — that can go a long way towards improving neighborhoods and quality of life.
Back to the Albany sleuth:
It seems like every European country has their own version of this sign, each with subtle differences, so I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Some are lighter blue, some darker blue, and a few are yellow or white. Some have a white border, some have no border. Some are longer rectangles, some shorter, some square.
Then there’s the shape of the walking figure: differences in the angle of the arms and legs, the shape of the head and whether it’s attached to or floating from the body, the presence or absence of a belt. The curve of the line separating the house from the car (or its absence). The limb positions of the child playing soccer. Some have trees instead of the car, some have trees in addition to the car. Some have a female and another child figure in the distance.
So many differences, and yet once you see it, you know what it is.
I prefer the one in Iceland, with the disappointed car:
From a persistent sleuth:
Oh at long last! For years I have looked every week in the hope of a familiar view, or at least a familiar setting, and for years I have been bamboozled (mostly). So when I saw this week’s view, I thought to myself, “That is an unmistakably grim setting.” The leaden skies, the tower block in the distance, the unimaginative cladding on the office building on the left, the traffic camera, and especially the Victorian rail shed. OK, the faux Hausmannian office was a bit weird, but why not. England is full of odd things. It had to be England! Depressing old England!
I am pretty sure London has no rail sheds by the river, so maybe it’s in the Home Counties somewhere? There appear to be a lot of Porsches in the rail-shed-turned-carpark, so why not look for a Porsche showroom by a river?
Much pointless Googling later, I returned to the photo. Porsche showrooms tend not to be in disused rail sheds, it turns out. I looked closer: are they even all Porsches?
Which is when I spotted the parking sign. Aha!
That was also the eureka moment for a sleuth in Hertfordshire (which is, in fact, one of those Home Counties):
The key clue — hiding in plain sight — was the sign in the car park across the street:
Clear “P” visible, with a random five-digit alphanumeric code. It had to be a parking location signifier, and a quick google of “AN993 parking” pointed to the Zuiderterras parking area in [city redacted].
I’m assuming a high number of correct guesses this week, and I doubt mine is even that early compared to others! So this is a short entry, as I prepare to head off again. Thanks for your hard work.
He’s on the Correct Guesser list now, since he also circled the right window. Getting very close to that window was our super-sleuth — and new father — in West Orange:
Hello! We continue to be in a rough spot for baby sleep and a busy spot for work — not a great pair of things to have sync up. So tired.
But somehow I found time for this week’s contest. You left us a surprising clue in this one — one that could leapfrog a keen-eyed sleuth right to the solution with the right hunch: the “P: AN993” sign. That’s unmistakably for a parking lot with app-based payment, of the kind that’s exceedingly familiar to suburbanites like myself. The Latin lettering and general vibe permit an inference that we’re in Europe — in a city, and maybe a city or neighborhood with “AN-“ in the name. And so we are! It’s [city redacted].
We’re looking out between a crack in some buildings at some parking lot abutting the river. It’s a nice reminder for urbanists inclined to doomerism that America isn’t the only country to waste precious waterfront real estate on car storage. And the window itself seems like a pretty easy guess this week???? Though classically that means I'm likely to be way off.
And now I hear the baby stirring. Pray for us ...
The parking sign and the street sign were also crucial for the Berkeley super-sleuth, who notes regarding the first sign, “Some wag on Flickr has called it the Do NOTHING here!!!! sign”:
Yet another sign was seized upon by a previous winner in Toronto:
This week I started with the sign that says “MSC” on the building with the blue support rails:
I assumed these were signs for a construction company and searched for MSC + construction. I got a lot of results for Masters of Science (Construction), which wasn’t helpful, but buried among them was a construction company apparently based in a small town near Quebec City. This I quickly recognised as a chasse à l'oie sauvage and, since Quebec City is somewhat European in ambience, I changed my search to “msc construction” + europe. Not helpful.
He got to the right building, as did the following sleuth — who has more on MSC:
The best clues are the royal crest on top of the parking and the MSC sign. The architecture is clearly Northern European, but the vegetation doesn’t feel Nordic. So I looked at all ports where MSC ships dock outside of Norway. MSC has both cruises and container ships, so I looked at all ports where there is a narrow channel with some vegetation across.
Here’s the Chini-eyed view of the right port:
An “avid fan” of the VFYW names the city we’re looking at:
I think this is my second submission ever, after my ignominious whiff on my first attempt at the most recent VFYW in Japan — the country I grew up in! How embarrassing.
This week, the first small giveaway is the traffic sign for an EU residential area sign. The second is the general architecture of the parking garage across the street — the triangular structure reminiscent of Belgian Churches and buildings with iconic stepped gables.
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