Is this the street where you live?
June 2, 2011, 6 Comments
A rather different post today. A man in Texas sent me this photo and asked if I could identify the street (yes, I get a lot of interesting emails these days). He has spent some time on Google Earth narrowing it down to Switzerland, and then asked me if it is in Bern. My answer: no idea.
I certainly don’t recognise it but it looks like it could be a Swiss street – the zebra crossing is the right colour for one thing – but in Bern or Zurich or Basel, or any number of places in the German-speaking part. From the style of the older buildings, it doesn’t look like anywhere in Romandie or Ticino, but I could be wrong. And it’s most likely not a current photo as you rarely see that many television aerials on Swiss roofs anymore. It’s all cable or satellite these days.
So if you’re reading this in Switzerland – do you recognise this street? Is it where you live or work? Or maybe a friend or relative lives there? Send this post to everyone you know in Switzerland and maybe we can find out the answer. A collective Miss Marple for the internet age.
Here is the original link I was sent, with a slightly clearer picture.
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6 Comments on "Is this the street where you live?"
Please ask him for the highest quality image he has. If we can make out what some of the shop signs say then we can have a much easier time figuring this out.
Maybe you could ask the man from Texas whether he has the photo in a higher resolution? It’s still quite small in the original link, and more identifiable detail would surely help – maybe we could read shop signs or even car numbers…
Just a speculation: The round sign in the lower right, between the walking and the standing person, could be an inn sign. And if it’s an inn sign: Swiss inn signs often display an advertisement for a particular beer. This sign seems to be yellow with a horizontal bar in the middle and some kind of logo above the bar. In my opinion, this could be a Cardinal beer sign, see Cardinal’s website for the logo. Well, and if it’s Cardinal, I would rather place the street in the Romandie, where the Cardinal brand (now fully owned and produced by ubiquitous Feldschlösschen, by the way) is much more widespread than in other parts of Switzerland.
Hamlet & Patrick, thanks for your input. As I told Diccon in an email, this photo was from a weekly contest that ended Tuesday. It was Geneva. You can see the results here:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-view-from-your-window-contest-winner-52.html
Patrick, you are correct about the Cardinal Beer sign. Not sure that would have helped me though. There was even one Geneva resident that was quite frustrated.
But you guys seem like you may be the type to enjoy it. The new contest comes out every Saturday, guesses are due Tuesday by noon, Central Time (USA), and results are posted shortly afterward.
But be warned, it can be addictive.
Your contact in Texas was looking for an answer to the ‘View from your window’ contest held every week on Andrew Sullivan’s political blog. (www.andrewsullivan.com)
This week’s contest is now over, and this picture turns out to have been taken in Geneva.
Well, it’s of course easy to claim this now, after the solution, but Geneva is in fact one of the cities in Romandie I thought most likely to be the place, as Geneva is a bit atypical for Swiss cities in several aspects, and I could imagine the television aerials pretty well there 🙂
it’s probably Rue Voltaire in Geneva, I went to High school in front of these buildings