(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.)
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
Money quote from Anthony Bourdain: “Your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”
Julia Child’s quote about the fruit is even more disturbing
A tree that’s existed for 200 million years and is often called a living fossil
The world’s only elected, rotating monarchy
“Yes, God is a woman and has boobs — or at least one boob.”
Our super-sleuth in Eagle Rock has a followup photo:
Here’s a photo of my wife and our fuzzy buddy, Angus, standing astride the San Andreas Fault, near New Cuyama, CA:
Another update featuring a canine comes from our super-sleuth in Sagaponack:
The update on our puppy is that the surgery was successful, and our biggest challenge now is keeping him from running around too much. Nice to be young!
Any left from his litter? I’ve got three acres of woods that need a guardian.
Here’s our super-sleuth in Berkeley following up:
I hope you’ll accept this belated walk down memory lane. (Sometimes I can’t find time to read a VFYW write-up until Wednesday or Thursday after I’ve finished writing and submitting the cinema report for the next one.)
As a born and bred Bay Arean, all of the earthquake talk last week got me reminiscing. My very earliest memory is of a quake that struck when I was 3 years, 8 months old. Its magnitude was 5.7 and its epicenter — beneath the Gulf of the Farallones outside the Golden Gate — was 25 miles from our single-story ranch house, which was built on a concrete-slab foundation on a level, solid, non-landfill lot in Marin County. As a Brit might say, we were safe as houses — but I think my parents, who’d moved to the Bay Area from Maryland, must’ve been all shook up about it.
On the other hand, for this sub-4-year-old, who would never have dreamed the dinette could jump around like that, it was my first amusement park ride. Make it do it again! Make it do it again! (I think that sense memory is why I’ve never experienced an earthquake that wasn’t in some way more thrilling than scary.)
The 100-year-old Berkeley house I live in now has been retrofitted — bolted to its foundation with plywood reinforced cripple walls. It shakes more than my childhood house did, but not enough that I’ve ever felt nervous during the many quakes that have rolled through.
Which brings me to my other big earthquake memory: the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, the one sometimes called the World Series Earthquake because it struck just before the first pitch of the third game of the World Series (which already was expected to be earth-shaking for Bay Area fans because it was being played by the As and the Giants — both Bay Area Teams at the time).
Anyway, even with an epicenter 60 miles away, the Loma Prieta quake was a lot more destructive than my childhood one had been. People died, homes built on landfill in San Francisco’s Marina District were leveled, a double-decker freeway four miles from me collapsed, as did part of the roadbed on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.
At the moment it hit, I had just begun my three-mile walk home from the Berkeley Campus. I passed a campus building and heard all the windows rattling like crazy as if a hoard of demonstrators was inside staging some kind of organized ruckus. But I could see no one at any of the windows and I felt nothing. When I got home and discovered there’d been a power failure, I only thought, “Shit! Jeanne set the VCR to record the game! She’ll be pissed!” I’m not sure how long it took me to learn the game had been cancelled, that there’d been a major earthquake.
The only thing out of place in the house was an empty videotape box that had fallen off the hearth. That was all.
Our super-sleuth on Park Avenue should be very proud:
I appreciated the comments regarding FIRE in last week’s write-up. It’s a great organization, and funnily enough, our younger daughter — a rising sophomore and frequent VFYW collaborator — is working at FIRE in their summer intern program at the moment. She’s loving it.
Love that! One more followup comes from our self-described wine geek in San Francisco:
It’s been a while, I know. Last week, I was in the Texas hill/wine country and thought the VFYW was from somewhere near there. Not. I realized pretty quickly it was somewhere in California and eventually got to Parkfield, but being the lazy slug I am, I never sent in an entry.
I do want to note, however, that there was a prior contest near here a couple of years ago: #422, in San Luis Obispo. I actually submitted an entry to that one and briefly mentioned James Dean’s famous car crash nearby, and my summary was a bit different from the one you included in the Parkfield write-up last week. Dean of course died, probably instantly, but his passenger — a Porsche mechanic named Rolf Wutherich — survived. He was thrown from the car and ended up with severe injuries.
The caption from The Hollywood Museum: “James Dean and German Porsche mechanic Rolf Wutherich in front of Competition Motors in Hollywood the morning of September 30, 1955. The crash later that day would cost Dean his life and leave Wutherich seriously injured. Wutherich later returned to Germany and was killed in a single car accident in 1981.”
Interestingly, the driver of the other car, Donald Turnupseed, walked away with minor injuries. He was driving a much heavier, stolid Ford Tudor (two-door), which outweighed Dean’s “Little Bastard” by more than 1000 pounds. He hitchhiked home after the crash.
Nevertheless, it was a monumental and historic event, since Dean was then posthumously nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Giant. Imagine if he was driving a bit slower and had made it to Paso Robles for a glass of Dusi vineyards Zinfandel. Would he have been as “cool”? In my mind, yes. In most other people’s minds, no.
Another sleuth writes:
I love the addition of people’s own views to the VFYW lately (even if they don’t make the cut for the featured view). It’s so cool to see where all of the sleuths are hanging out.
The newest addition:
Fifty-seven people live on this island — Fetlar, in Shetland, Scotland. We are here on holiday, and every morning we get up at 5, make tea, and catch up on emails and bits of work. We had to take three ferries to reach it — the quietest place I’ve ever been. It’s my view as I type this.
Next door to this holiday house is a small local museum. It houses what was once recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest message in a bottle ever recovered. It spent 98 years at sea, having been released in 1914 and found by a Shetland fishing boat in 2012. It hadn’t gone very far — only a few nautical miles from where it was dropped!
Thanks for a great read each week.
Thanks for the great view! On to this week’s main view, here’s our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks, naming the right continent:
At first I thought this was going to be impossible. The view looked like it could be taken from anywhere in the world, but as I kept looking around the photo, I could see that it was somewhere in Asia and somewhere tropical.
You left the word “durian” and some Chinese lettering unblurred at the bottom, so I took that as the first clue to run down. Durian’s Chinese spelling — 榴蓮 — actually spells out liǔlián, because most of the Chinese who immigrated to the region of Nanyang (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia) spoke Minnan Hokkien, which was prevalent in the southern region of China, and their “l” and “d” sounds were often swapped.
The durian is a fruit that grows mostly in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines:
It is highly coveted in China, and imports by last estimate have reached $6.99 billion a year. Many Chinese tourists, in order to eat it when it’s freshest, will fly into some of these countries, eat some durian, and fly back home.
I thought maybe I would look at some Chinese cities that might be the view, but with “durian” spelled out in English text, I limited my search to Hong Kong and Macau. Those cities were much more dense than the city in the view.
Zooming in on the Chinese lettering is our super-sleuth in Durham, UK:
You were kind enough to leave “durian” in the view:
This immediately suggested [country redacted], and a bit of googling got me to Dunian Durian, a fruit wholesaler. Here’s a screen grab from one of their TikTok videos:
Here’s our super-sleuth in Fort Collins:
As usual, another great VFYW image. The obvious element in the photo is the word DURIAN, which immediately brought me to Singapore — the only place where I’ve tried durian. I’m sure the Dish community is familiar with the saying about this fruit: “It tastes like heaven, but smells like hell.” TBH, I don’t remember the taste, but I sure remember the smell (stink)!
From a previous winner:
So this week was pretty easy ... as soon as I had Google translate the Chinese characters:
I don’t know if this is cheating, but it feels like cheating! Haha
Nah, not cheating. The A2 Team phoned a friend:
The name of the store that Dusty is covering up caught my eye: “Dunian Durian,” and below, in traditional Chinese (thank you, neighbor Cindy, for deciphering it): “Durian Specialty Shop.”
San Mateo breaks down the Chinese characters:
A bit of OCR attention to the characters gives us 都念榴蓮大排档:
The first two characters literally mean “everyone is thinking about/craving,” so a natural English rendering would be “everyone craves durian food stall.” But the first two characters also approximate the sound “Dunian,” so another rendering would be “Dunian durian street food stall.” And that is consistent with the word under Dusty — “Dunian”.
Here’s a Chinese city guess from our super-sleuth in Chattanooga:
Guangzhou, China?
I was afraid AI slop was leading me on a slow boat to China, but I enjoyed learning about the rise in Hainan Durian agriculture competing in Asia. According to Google, the Chinese distribution center is in the Nansha District of Guangzhou. This random photo of Nansha highlights does have some matching buildings, but that’s as close as I’m going to get:
Our super-sleuth in Rome writes, “Now I can’t help wondering what a durian tastes like”:
Wikipedia is encouraging — “The flavour of the flesh is complex with savoury notes, and the texture is creamy and pudding-like” — but less so about the smell: “Some people regard the durian as having a pleasantly sweet fragrance, whereas many others find the aroma overpowering and unpleasant. The persistence of its strong odour, which may linger for several days, has led some hotels and public transportation services in Southeast Asia […] to ban the fruit.”
This brave soul would like to try it anyway.
Our brave soul on Park Avenue did:
This view for me was definitely Southeast Asia from the get-go, and then the “Durian” shop was the hint that it’s in [country redacted]. I had a girlfriend many moons ago who actually liked durian and brought one over to the apartment one day to try to convince me — to no avail. We had to air out the place for days. It’s like eating custard over an open sewer with a piece of raw onion in one nostril. So not a fan — but those who like it, love it.
If you’re not deterred enough already, here’s the DC super-sleuth:
Just looking at pictures of the fruit turns my stomach, and it doesn’t help that detractors have sometimes compared the odor to “sewage,” “stale vomit,” “skunk spray,” “rotting flesh,” and (my favorite) “pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” Social media is full of videos of people reacting with disgust when they smell and eat the fruit. The smell can cling to skin and fabrics and persist for hours or even days, and some people wear gloves to eat it because of the difficulty of getting the odor off their hands.
Chini stays far away from the stench:
The Ridgewood super-sleuth actually enjoys the fruit — and he spotted something in the view that no one else did:
Durians are very tasty, though a lot of people dislike them. Kind of a mix of sweet vanilla and onion — yum!
Although Dusty concealed “DURIAN,” she did not conceal “Alor” — towards the bottom right:
And searching for Durian Alor takes you straight to this backspace area in [city redacted].
Here’s another city guess:
Singapore!
That’s as close as I’ve got. I had a lovely stay there a few years back. The durian referenced in the sign is going to get a ton of entries. My experience included the “No durian” signs on public transit, right next to “No knives.” We bought and tasted one (exceedingly stupidly) before throwing the husk in the trash. Some say it tastes like rotting flesh. I thought it tasted merely like old potatoes — but it smelled like death for days in the kitchenette garbage.
Our super-sleuth in Sydney is also familiar with such signs:
San Mateo spots another sign:
I’m shocked — shocked. Because this week’s contest completely ignores the first rule of VFYWing:
Heh. Eagle Rock chimes in:
I tried durian once. ONCE. Thank you, no.
A compilation of reactions come from the married team in Falcon Heights:
We spotted the Durian food storefront early on and took that to imply we were in Thailand, probably Bangkok, as the durian fruit is notorious on a YouTube channel we track — the TRY Channel:
But Deb figured out it wasn’t Thailand.
More durian fun comes from this previous winner:
Sadly I don’t have any stories about durian, but it looks like Dunian Durian is a good place to go for a durian buffet — all you can eat in one hour for RM 168 or RM 198, depending on the type of durian you choose. Or maybe a durian hat, as seen at their Instagram page.
Other sleuths will no doubt have experience with durian, but I’ll just add a quote attributed to Anthony Bourdain: “Your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.” Still, he seems to have liked it — sampling durian ice cream in my old San Francisco neighborhood:
Here comes the creativity from San Mateo:
Now that we know we’re at a particular durian shop, there’s no question that the focus of this week’s Reimagined must be the durian. In fact, another photo of the Dunian Durian shop leads us to that conclusion with an extra-large durian in front:
Now that we know where to focus, looking into a durian portal, we find our Reimagined for this week:
Or, later in the day, we find a dramatic sunset over Bukit Bintang, viewed through the mystical durian portal:
It looks like a smelly Eye of Sauron.
Here’s Sherman Oaks again, naming the right city:
The apartment building in the middle of the view with all the rounded balconies gave an Indonesian or Malaysian vibe.
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