VFYW: 'What's With The Funi Business?'

For contest #449, we reunite with a recurring character.

(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:

Wow!!! Fantastic. I never thought this would happen. I’d like to thank the Academy. And I guess I have to get out the cowboy shirt and Wranglers and head to Tulsa now.

From the submitter of last week’s contest, who works on that TU campus:

This was so fun to read and to learn more about my new city. I’m ashamed to admit that I had no idea this campus had its own art gallery; I’ll now be checking it out this week!

Here’s a followup from Eagle Rock (who submitted the view for contest #318 in Chefchaouen, Morocco):

I cringe a little whenever there’s a disputed window, as there was again with SeaTac. Try as I might, I can’t forget my own personal failing, caused by carelessness and haste, that caused so much weeping and gnashing of teeth. A wholly avoidable catastrophe. Worse, a lovely place is now eternally besmirched by association. Oh, the shame of the “Chefchaouen Incident.” It’s my own personal Chappaquiddick.

Heh. On to this week’s view, a previous winner in Alexandria starts us off:

I don’t know the street or window of this pic, but the atmosphere captured in the photograph looks like Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

A few years ago, my son was awarded a baby-Fulbright to study Persian in Dushanbe and live with a Tajik family for five months. Of course we wanted to visit him, so I booked a trip. When we got there, of course, he texted to me that he was off on a backpacking trip with friends in the Pamirs and that he’d see me and his dad at the end of the week. So we hired two super-fun guides and went all over Tajikistan for four days and had a blast. Those guys were super jokesters and we had so much fun.

We did manage to get a visit with my son, too :) … after meeting a Polish couple who had run into him in the Pamirs. Small world.

Another sleuth goes with Washington, DC, specifically, “The old Smithsonian building, now the US Forest Service building.” Another wrote “Dupont Circle, Washington, DC” — before quickly following up with, “Definitely not Dupont Circle! I think that’s a winning observation for someone who wears glasses!”

The beginning of this sleuth’s entry gets us to the right continent:

The cars, license plates, and signs look European. Looks like driving on the right, so continental. Looks cold and a little dreary, suggesting northern, central or eastern Europe.

From the Berkeley super-champ, who knows the archive better than anyone:

This contest took me back to November 2021, contest #305, which had a brace of snoozing Dustys covering a whole phrase on a bilingual sign. Now she’s again sleeping on a bilingual sign, but this time the final “t” in the non-English word is clearly legible behind her butt:

The super-sleuth in SF exclaims, “Thanks for not covering the whole exit sign in the foreground! That was the key clue that immediately got me to the right country.” Bend writes, “I had Google Translate convert the word ‘exit’ into every European language.” One of the languages covered:

My guess is Brest, France. My reasoning is that the “Exit” sign appears to end in the letters “at”. The picture looked like a European city, so I asked ChatGPT which European languages other than English have a noun form of “exit” ending in “t”. ChatGPT claims that Breton is the only such language.

I looked around Rennes, France on Google Street View for a bit (since it’s the largest city in Brittany), but the architecture looked different than the buildings in the picture. The architecture in Brest (the second largest city in Brittany) looks similar to the view, so I’m going with Brest. (Apparently Breton is also more widely spoken in Brest than in Rennes.)

ChatGPT FAIL. Another city in France: “I am guessing this is in Paris, possibly at a metro station.” Another country: “The building in the center looks like the prow of a dreadnought … where else but London?” Back across the English Channel:

Ugh, it’s Wednesday night already, just before the VFYW deadline. I had such a great start on Friday, but life and work happened for the rest of the weekend! I’m going to guess Germany. Signs look like they are EU and maybe Dusty is covering up “Ausfahrt”?

Another who picked that country:

I’m guessing somewhere in northern Germany, maybe Berlin, based on the overcoats, tree branches, and that the local language word for exit is covered up except for the “t” — which suggests “Ausfahrt.” The mix of architectural styles, including some fancy buildings, along with electronic bus signs, suggests a wealthy city — thus, somewhere in Germany. But I don’t recognize exactly where.

Here’s the beginning of an entry from a “ski bum from Flathead Valley”:

I was cleaning out my inbox when I decided to look at the bottom of the VFYW from last week. I thought for sure it was somewhere in eastern Germany until I saw some of the signage — the street car sign, to be exact.

Another sign is spotted by a returning sleuth in Hertfordshire, UK:

I’ve just re-subscribed to the Dish, so this is my first opportunity to look at VFYW in a while (checking my emails, it’s been 2.5 years since I was able to submit). Grateful that you chose a nice straightforward one to ease me back in!

Leaving the “t” visible on the local translation of the exit sign was an interesting clue. My initial thought based on the architecture was northern European, but none of those languages have a word for exit ending in “t” — at least based on my frequent use of their airports. The next clue was the rather child-like tractor sign:

Lo-and-behold, a quick Google search for “tractor road sign” turned up the same sign in the first handful of results, with the descriptor “Road Sign Used [country name redacted].”

Sometimes I have to redact location names to prevent early spoilers. Another sleuth:

My wife has an interest in rubbish (which is probably why she ended up with me), so she initially thought that the distinctive green bin was our way into the VFYW competition. However, after wondering whether the no-tractor sign in the middle of a city had been put up by Keir Starmer to deal with protesting British Farmers, it was Dusty who got us to the right city.

Part of her enduring legacy. Here’s Paul on behalf of the weekly sleuth trio in Vancouver, WA:

This week we had lots of interesting “dead ends” to explore, including a tractor sign and this mysterious road sign:

But the real clue was in the mirror-image signage “Clark” and “Hotel” behind it. “Hotel Clark” didn’t immediately hit with a web search, but “Clark Hotel” nailed it!

Another clue is scrutinized by the super-sleuth in Plano:

So this week’s first impression is that we see a Central European city that wasn’t bombed during World World Two, so the 18th and 19th century architecture of an older district was not destroyed. If I had no time for sleuthing, I would have used Vienna as a proximity guess because the beige building in the center resembles some of the architecture I’ve seen in Vienna. But I decided to start sleuthing with the interesting baroque lamp post:

This led me briefly astray, because I found this EXACT lamp post design in the Piata Mica (Grand Square) in Sibiu, Romania:

But the buildings in that square are older than those seen from our window, and there is nothing like the modern “... EL” (yes, hotel) to the right of the beige building. There must be some interesting Habsburgian explanation for that coincidence, but never mind.

The super-sleuth in West Orange writes:

We live in a time of fraying norms. Sadly, there’s some historical precedent. In ancient Rome, for example, the Gracchus brothers bent Roman politics to force through an agrarian reform law. Elite political violence grew in response. Then a few generations later, Caesar marched on Rome.

Similarly, 2,000 years later, Chris Bodenner starts introducing window views from non-hotel locations … and then window views that move!

Call me Brutus. But the super-chef has my back:

I think the one this week treads close to violating the VFYW rules — like the Ferris wheel in Las Vegas — but I guess if the car was stationary at the time, it’s OK. And anyway, you get to decide the rules!

So what kind of “car” is he referring to? Berkeley knows, and here’s his initial short email sent right after the view was posted: “Another funicular!?!” Bethlum writes, “And now I have that blasted earworm ‘Funiculì Funiculà’ running through my brain”:

From the super-sleuth in Chicagoland:

What’s with the funi business?

I see one of your sleuths saw the results of the Lake Como contest from a funicular station and figured they could do one better by taking the image from inside the funicular itself. So this is probably the first official View From Your Funicular, no?

Too bad you just used a Seattle location; you could have had a View From Your Monorail. Ah well, there’s alway Wuppertal and its View From Your Schwebebahn.

The first time the VFYW saw a funicular (though I’d have to check with Berkeley) was for contest #347 in Bogotá, Colombia, but the actual view was taken from a hotel. From our super-sleuth in Sydney:

Time for a new VFYW heuristic. The first one: If in doubt, look for a nearby airport (today we are about 24 km, or a 30 minutes drive, from the airport). The second: If it isn’t a hotel, it could be a cable car/funicular.

Here’s the funicular via Chini, if you squint:

Our super-sleuth on the UWS clears up the foreign language mystery:

Thank you for letting us see that the local-language word for exit ended with a “t”. Google Translate had me at first considering the whimsical ausfahrt, putting us in Germany. But I’ve been there many times and have always seen the word ausgang used in that circumstance. And the second-to-last letter looks like an “a” — which led me to the Hungarian kijárat.

Hungary it is. Which city?

Hi Chris! I used to live in Hungary, and I got a real Hungarian vibe from this week’s picture. The faded Habsburg yellow of the curved building, the ornate lamp posts. I double-checked the word for “exit” and it is kijárat — which works for that partially concealed sign.

I don’t think this is Budapest, given the tractor street sign. (This is a great picture — lots of clues!) I’m going to go with Debrecen, a city on the great plain that conveniently has no accents or umlauts in it. I could do more research, but I work in international development and it’s been a depressing week. So Debrecen it is.

From a first-time entrant:

Oh my god, I finally got one!

I’m a long-time reader of Andrew’s going way back to the Love, Undetectable and Gap ad days, but I slowly fell away during the Twitter years. Katie and Jesse led me back via Substack, and the constant prodding as a freebie subscriber wore me down. Fine, take my money.

So many red herrings in this contest, but I knew right away it had to be European. The baroque street lamps felt like Belgium. A Saab station wagon had me chasing down Sweden for a while, but the street lamps didn’t match. I did a search on the lamp design and found matches all over eastern Europe.