Hey, I've been there before!

For over a year, I've enjoyed looking at the daily "View From Your Window" entries over at Andrew Sullivan's blog; usually, I'd scroll carefully to hide the caption and try to guess where the picture was taken. It's fun to see how inaccurate my guesses are and the subtle clues I look at to classify a location.

Apparently so did a lot of his readers: this summer, he's expanded it into a weekly contest every Saturday. The last two or three have been so hard I didn't have a clue, plus readers have been going all out to win, e.g., finding the place, going there, and taking their own picture during the contest's three-day duration!

This Saturday I forgot to even look; so, I was surprised on Sunday when I saw the latest contest entry. I immediately recognized the orange roof and the church spire as being in the medieval city center of Tallinn, Estonia.

The View from Your Window Shot (courtesy Andrew Sullivan):


Going back to my pictures, it didn't take long to find my own shot of the spire:




Since I took often pictures randomly while wandering around a new city, I didn't have a label or an accompanying picture of an identifying plaque. But searching Google images for churches in Tallinn gave me my answer quickly: it's the Tallinn Niguliste church spire.

I entered the contest and sent him one of my own pictures. I imagine, though, since it's such a prominent feature of the Tallinn skyline that a lot of people can identify it and find it readily in Tallinn and take more recent pictures that better match the angle. Wish me luck. If nothing else, the contest motivated me to identify my photo.