VFYW: The Dish Gets High AF

For contest #347, we travel to a big city at a big elevation.

(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 Giuseppe, the super-champ in Rome:

This week I literally scratched my head. Why leave such a monumental clue in the photo? An attempt to set an all-time record of correct guesses? Was the sign too big for Dusty to hide it?

The day after I saw the photo in the main Dish email (since the VFYW email arrives when it’s early morning in Italy), everything became clear: it was a gimme!

As I mentioned last week, I captured the photo seen above, on a working vacation in South America. A month ago a $260 roundtrip ticket landed in my inbox, via Scott’s Cheap Flights (#nonsponsoredcontent), so I couldn’t pass it up — especially since it was a Wednesday-to-Wednesday flight on Delta that fit perfectly with the Dish publishing cycle.

The first entry for the contest arrived 39 minutes after the photo was posted … emailed by you know who:

Another sleuth:

Ok, you said this was a gimme. Maybe for people who read Spanish? Sorry I took German, but didn’t recognize Germany last week. D’oh!

I also took German in school, so my lack of Spanish for this trip was humbling. This next sleuth was lured by the gimme this week:

I love the VFYW, but I usually try not to play, because once I’m sucked in, I start losing huge chunks of time that I really should be applying to work or family. But this time, the weekend was already ruined by the lingering remnants of Ian, and “Farmatodo” was too much of a hook to look away. So, I surrendered. 

So did this sleuth:

At first glance, I was gobsmacked that this image was used with the names of the businesses not covered by the Dish beagle. I figured maybe Farmatodo was a red herring or something. 

From a sleuth in Japan: “The ‘Farmatodo’ clue was initially misleading, since the company website initially pops up with a Venezuelan web extension (farmatodo.com.ve).” Another sends a screenshot with a tiny utility vehicle — one of many I saw on that street:

Another sleuth harrumphs:

A gimme, he said. Harrumph.

It is an iconic building, but nowhere is its address listed. There are a few other buildings around the world with similar lined exteriors, but only one with the Farmatodo on the ground floor. So, that should be easy to locate, right? Turns out Farmatodos in this city are like Duane Reades in NYC — practically one on every corner.

As another puts it, “Well, the Farmatodo clue made it pretty easy to figure out which country we are in — but, there are only slightly less than 100 Farmatodos to look at.” Another narrows it down: “Farmatodo is a Venezuelan pharmacy/convenience chain that expanded into [another country] in 2009 and now has ~35 stores in the capital city.” Another: “The Farmatodo clue had the potential of being as much of a problem as the chain of wine shops in Paris for contest #286.”

A previous winner names the right country: