VFYW: A View Askew

(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:

• Home to more than 300 Buddhist temples — the most of any city in this country

• An abundance of hot springs

• Some epic tales of elephants and water fights — and elephants in water fights

• An animal whose tongue can be longer than its body

• Randy getting randy

From the winner of last week’s contest, a free subscriber:

I’ll take two years of DISH, of course! Thanks again.

From another recent winner:

My book arrived! Thank you so much, Chris!! I love it!

That sleuth lives just outside Baltimore, so hopefully she’ll be able to make it down to Alexandria next month — for the first VFYW meetup! Our super-sleuth in that northern VA city floated the idea to me recently, and it’s a fantastic one. She has details:

Please join DMV-area VFYW enthusiasts for a Fall Picnic in our backyard on September 26 (Sept 27 rain-date) from 5-8 pm in the Delray neighborhood of Alexandria, VA. My husband and I are within walking distance of the Braddock Road (yellow/blue line) metro stop … no sleuthing required.

We’ll provide BBQ, a vegan dish, drinks, and cutlery for the first 50 RSVP participants. Please feel free to bring, if you’re inspired, a potluck dish to share, and VFYW memories encouraged ... with recipes!

We will provide further details to RSVP folks. (For example, there is free on-street parking, but it’s tight.) Let’s visit, share stories around the fire pit, and plot more VFYW adventures … with a group photo.

Please RSVP to contest@andrewsullivan.com, including any plus-ones. And if you’d like to bring a small potluck offering, please note that as well, along with any ideas you might have for the meetup.

It’s a shame our super-sleuth in Berkeley is so far from Alexandria:

Out here on the left coast, the Weekly Dish usually hits my inbox around 10:30 or 11am, which means on a typical Friday, if the search goes well, I can hope to start gathering images for a collage and identifying movies for a cinema report before lunchtime. But Jeanne and I had tickets for a 10am Friday showing of The Odyssey at our local IMAX, so I wasn’t expecting to be able to get down to VFYW business until 2:30 at the earliest.

But at around 9:30, as I sat in the middle of the auditorium, long before they’d even started showing the ads before the trailers, I glanced at my email and saw the Dish had arrived! That gave me just enough time to identify the city before the “Please silence your phones” warning. Thanks for the unexpected leg-up on my weekend!

Nice! Here’s a followup on last week’s contest from a regular sleuth:

Wow! Lots of great info and perspectives on the ATL VFYW. Well done, as always. A few post-pub notes …

When I wrote about the big-time movie biz in Atlanta, large studios’ relationships with the city were drastically changing, resulting in a major contraction and offshoring of US production. Georgia production spending peaked at $4.4 billion in 2022, fell to about $2.3 billion in 2025, and major high-budget productions — most conspicuously Marvel — have fled to the UK and other overseas locations. (Here’s a free link from the WSJ about the shift.)

After going on the road with the band for three days, I wrote the cover story on The Producers for MUZIK! Magazine in 1982:

They were on track to be the next big power pop band, but record company/management shenanigans got in the way and they peaked with their second LP. On a more personal note: my brother dated guitarist Van Temple’s ex-wife. Small world.

Atlanta’s Casbah” — with its mixture of Islamic and Egyptian architecture and design — is the “fabulous” Fox Theater. Threatened with razing in the mid-’70s, it was eventually placed on the National Register of Historic Places in May 1974 and thrives today as a (mainly) concert venue:

Finally, the building across the street from the VFYW entry is now a Kimpton hotel, with the restaurant Betty anchoring its ground floor. The was not always the case. The mid-rise apartment building was built in the early ‘50s and featured a swank, mid-century modern design. In later incarnations, it housed a nursing home, and after that, condos, before being purchased and rennoed by Kimpton:

As a kid, my parents would take my brother and me to after-church lunch at the restaurant where Betty is now located. It was called the Miami Cafeteria (Miami was the ground zero of swank back then, thus the name?). My brother and I would always finish eating before my parents, and I remember carousing up and down the apartment halls, poking our heads in rooms and offices we had no business being in, and commandeering the elevators, hitting every floor. The memory of the roasted chicken with rice and gravy still lingers.

Here’s our super-sleuth in West Orange:

Hi Chris! I’m appalled that I missed last week’s contest. For one, I knew it was Atlanta and talked myself out of it somehow. (“No Peachtree Tower visible; has to be somewhere else.”) But to make matters worse, I grew up five miles from the window in question and drove by it regularly. Agh!!!

In any event, I have a window view for you. This is from Indianapolis, and it would be impossible for the contest, but it might work for the newsletter. We were in town for Gencon at a lovely house outside the downtown:

A less staid view is sent by the VFYW chef:

You’ll never guess where this is:

Heh. I actually stopped by NYC en route to Ptown a few weeks ago and caught up with a friend who introduced me the newest Bathhouse location. It’s much fancier than the 134-year-old Russian/Turkish bathhouse in the East Village I frequented back in the day, but not annoyingly fancy; and it wasn’t as pricey as I expected. Much recommend.

Next up, I’m very touched that our super-sleuth in Prince George recalls an event I mentioned two years ago — the death of my stepdad:

I’m remembering you and your family today on Steve’s anniversary. Many prayers and best wishes.

Thanks so much. Below is Steve and my mom on the Oregon coast, with an inset of a FaceTime call that she and I had Wednesday with Steve’s son — a super-talented helicopter pilot:

She and I are heading out to Portland soon to catch up with family and tell stories of Steve:

On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Warrensburg:

Hope it’s been an okay week for you. I’m nervously counting down the days til the fall semester starts up and somehow all the work I’ve been putting off will magically get done. Good thing I have a fun distraction in the VFYW!

This week was pretty tough, I’ll admit. I guessed somewhere in East Asia or Southeast Asia, based on the architecture and flora, but I was stumped for a while after that. The lucky break came when I began focusing on this detail:

I was sure it said “Le Chat,” so I looked for every hotel or cafe with that name up and down the Pacific coast. After that failed, I wondered if it wasn’t “chat” but something else. Chal? Chap? It turns out to have been “Chai”, and the “Le” is actually “De” …

The DC super-sleuth exclaims, “Just two weeks after contest #516, durian again rears its ugly, stinky head!”

I had hoped that after the Kuala Lumpur contest, I could avoid seeing, reading about, or thinking about durian for a long, long time. No such luck. It turns out that durian, the world’s smelliest fruit, is extremely popular in [city redacted]. The city holds an annual durian festival and has recently experienced a surge in the sale and consumption of durian due to a government-backed and influencer-driven marketing campaign promoting the fruit.

I have to say that some of the photos of durian dishes at the Durianism Cafe (like the durian pizza seen below) make the fruit look much more appetizing than anything I recall seeing from the Kuala Lumpur contest. Even so, I don’t think I could be convinced to try it:

Another sleuth guesses: “Hanoi, Vietnam, from a hotel rooftop bar.” Below is the weekly flyover from the CO/NJ super-sleuth, who transports us from his Colorado home to this week’s building:

Fly to Alexandria next month! From our married team in Falcon Heights:

Just like the rest of the VFYW herd this week, I imagine, Deb and I fixated on the former residence of S. Dali the surrealist building sitting plumb-center in the window view:

I admit to a false start involving water tanks, an approach that led nowhere. Eventually, Deb found the surrealist place.

Identifying that place is our resident architect:

A few weeks ago, while discussing how buildings react in an earthquake, I asked: If a Frank Gehry building gets shaken in an earthquake and shifts a little, who can tell?

Well, this week we are looking directly at another pre-quaked building — to coin a phrase. At first I thought someone might be trying to copy Gehry, but that is definitely not the case here. The MO Room Hotel was conceptualized by the artist Mit Jai Inn, and he led a multidisciplinary team of artists, architects, designers, craftspeople, astrologers, and alternative-health practitioners. The hotel exterior is described as differently sized, box-shaped rooms “piled” together according to feng-shui and astrological principles.

MO Room contains 12 rooms, each corresponding to one animal in the Chinese zodiac. According to the hotel, each room is an individual artist’s interpretation of the artist’s own birth animal:

The animal symbolism was intended to influence the room’s geometry, furniture, doors, windows, bed, toilet placement, and treatment of the five elements — fire, wind, water, earth, and metal. The result is an irregular, cave-like interior. The hotel calls itself a livable sculpture.

I have to admit I’m not sure what to make of it. Drugs had to have been involved, right?

Another sleuth writes:

The ghastly carbuncle in the centre reminds me of some hotel in [city redacted]. (I struggle to see any redeeming features, but, who knows, someone might.) This thought is reinforced by [redacted] script on a nearby building. I’m afraid I can’t get beyond that!

Roberts Creek gets inside the ghastly carbuncle:

Here is an interior shot of a room featuring the brutalist architecture:

The guest reviews, however, are quite mixed. Although design enthusiasts praised its creativity, other guests complained that the concrete interiors made rooms feel dark, and that the artistic fixtures prioritized aesthetics over functionality — noting, for example, slow air conditioning and a lack of privacy in the bathrooms. I read one review titled “Don’t stay in the Rabbit room.”

San Mateo reimagines the odd hotel:

The Mo Rooms Hotel stands out because it looks nothing like the buildings around it. It’s built from exposed concrete, steel, and glass, with sloping walls and unusual angles that make it look more like a piece of modern sculpture than a hotel. Even from several blocks away, it stands out:

What appeals to me the most is that the architects never tried to make the building blend into its surroundings; they embraced the opposite approach. The weathered concrete, oversized windows, and dramatic geometry give the building the feel of a public art installation. Depending on the light, it almost seems to change personality. During the day it can look stark and industrial; in the evening, the warm light spilling through the windows softens the concrete and gives the whole building an almost mysterious presence.

And mysterious was the feeling I wanted to express in my Reimagined VFYW. I left the surrounding neighborhood unchanged but made the Mo Rooms Hotel glow from within, as though it possessed some hidden energy:

Awesome. A previous winner in Singapore names the right country: