Guess the City

It actually looks like Elbrus

Out and about but a cursory look at the map of the plains north of Mt Elbrus suggests Pyatigorsk might be in the right position, it even has a local hill for the view in pic 3

Yeah I can see views of the same three peaks from the outskirts of Pyatigorsk. If not there maybe it could be one of the nearby spa cities.

There are about a hundred streetview dots on top of the hill pic 3 was taken from but I can't find the particular one cherry blossom used. Here's another with some freaky disembodied people and a handy viewfinder

Pyatigorsk Tower
https://maps.app.goo.gl/F93t39kwPUDnJSYPA

And here's location 2

Поселок Свободы
https://maps.app.goo.gl/SYKcXnjdJvyhHxB27

I think the first one is beyond me

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0192805,43.0141974,3a,75y,253.24h,92.82t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipPtu2EMjIqcE7pxCK1HJ1Owrn4nQ7e0eYWilJN7!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipPtu2EMjIqcE7pxCK1HJ1Owrn4nQ7e0eYWilJN7%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya75.962105-ro-0-fo100!7i10258!8i5128

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0570569,43.0911895,3a,75y,343.53h,86.9t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMFe4k2pHbkOdWCB0rshaUw5BldRLW-QsEl_tpP!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMFe4k2pHbkOdWCB0rshaUw5BldRLW-QsEl_tpP%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi0-ya330.50504-ro-0-fo100!7i8192!8i4096

Elbrus was a relatively big clue but good work to slot home from there nonetheless

I wouldn't have got it without Elbrus but it's a pretty distinctive mountain, not many tower above their surroundings like that

Oh that's basically Georgia!

A really good one because it's unexpected. If someone had said to me: this is near Izmir,.I would have totally believed them until I saw Mt. Elbrus. I've been to Izmir, highly recommended.

I like the huge dog print you see if you navigate just left in the first link cherry blossom posted there.

I was really close to including the dog in the view, but there wasn't quite enough room to have the dog and the hill in the same view

https://i.postimg.cc/3xdQRCR9/Screenshot-2021-04-15-at-16-34-26.png

What's he got in there?

It's probably not the UK (looks more like France maybe) but if it somehow is the UK then it reminds me a lot of Cheltenham

Portugal, maybe?

the blue logo on the top right corner of his box is the shape of France, no?

yeah it's a prepaid package from La Poste, like this one:
https://prod.isg.bruneau.media/OMM/Images_Basse_Definition/ZoomHD/69/54/69545.jpg

the building on the left looks like a real estate agency

Is that a sliver of a gothic arch I see on the far right?

Isn't that a ridiculously small road for pedestrian traffic lights? I don't know what to make of that (a gigantic amount of pedestrians there?) - also, the poles are blue, which I don't think is the default color everywhere?

Dropped down into a few cities in the south of France and so far the only one where i can find any of those blue pedestrian crossing posts is Montpellier

I thought the flower shop name could be "Aroma" but so far this has lead to nowhere

Looks more like it ends with "-ama" to me, and begins with an "O," but that has also led me nowhere.

now I’m hoping it’s...
Vichy
you hit me with a flower
you do it every hour
Obama, you’re so Vichy

earnest guffaw at that, breastcrawl.

> Montpellier

back to Cheltenham then...

> Montpellier

back to Cheltenham them...

love the origin story for viscious (sorry for the tangent)

Reed said it was Andy Warhol who provided fuel for the song. "He said, 'Why don't you write a song called 'Vicious,'" Reed told Rolling Stone in 1989. "And I said, 'What kind of vicious?' 'Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower.'

would help if I could spell

Montpellier

back to Cheltenham them...

― koogs, Thursday, 15 April 2021 23:11 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Had to google this niche geographical quip

It would be a satisfying bit of synchronicity if correct tho

man, Montpellier is big :(

and it may not even be there either :-)

Confirmation that it is indeed not Montpellier might be helpful here. I kind of got it into my head last night that it might be an unrepresentative area of Paris but that's even bigger

I thought ILXors were good at this, but no, Benjamin Kuo is the guy who's good at this

Unable to locate Mr. Compean through the photo’s metadata — he had disabled his cellphone’s location settings — the authorities disseminated it on social media, where it eventually landed on the radar of the Twitter user @ai6yrham, according to Sgt. John Gilbert, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman.

The user, whose Twitter bio identifies him as a ham radio operator named Ben, responded to the Sheriff’s Department call for assistance on Tuesday morning with a thread that included satellite images and predicted the missing hiker’s coordinates. He wrote in a post that he had made sure to forward his predictions to the authorities.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Compean was located by rescuers, safe with no known injuries, in Angeles National Forest.

“I think, at least for our team, we haven’t had anything exactly like this,” Sergeant Gilbert said of the user’s assistance.

In an interview with KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, the Twitter user, whom the station identified as Benjamin Kuo, said he leaned on the scenery captured in Mr. Compean’s photo to help him deduce the hiker’s location.

“I’ve got a very weird hobby, which is I love taking a look at photos and figuring out where they’re taken,” Mr. Kuo told the station.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/us/missing-hiker-found.html

"he had disabled his cellphone’s location settings"

he effectively had a gps device on him and instead he sent a photo of some rocks?

He disabled his cellphone's GPS because he was hiking in the Bobcat Fire burn area and he was trying to avoid a $1000 fire. Every hiker in the San Gabriels is aware of which areas are closed off and the soot on the guy's legs in the original photo was a tip-off that he was in a restricted area.
https://www.dailynews.com/2021/04/17/missing-hiker-found-in-bobcat-fire-burn-area-is-investigated/amp/

Early in the pandemic, I was in a Zoom class that Kuo taught to help folks get their amateur radio. Solid dude - cool to see him get the kudos.

that last cherry blossom pic is indeed montpellier, well done or something !

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6118854,3.8656341,3a,75y,82.92h,70.96t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sSVpwW1ffD4I5DDyoKEb49Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

Ha wow, kudos on finding the spot Jibe, I'd stopped looking

Is that a sliver of a gothic arch I see on the far right?

― nickn, donderdag 15 april 2021 18:39

nickn was actually halfway there, that was the big clue, I guess: a section of the 18th century aqueduct

https://www.google.nl/maps/@43.6118532,3.8656526,3a,60y,105.72h,93.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sZTewZhSE1Hp6k4OhpA26Zw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

"the Saint-Clément Aqueduct is nicknamed Les Arceaux for its double row of Roman-inspired arches"

Ha wow, kudos on finding the spot Jibe, I'd stopped looking

― ignore the blue line (or something), lundi 19 avril 2021 13:48 (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

got lucky googling through quite a few variations of fleuriste + **ama until i found it

hah I was looking for "Ouama" or something like that - so off the mark as usual

the shop is called "Chuma" and it doesn't sell flowers, but decorations.

so all my searching Google Maps for "[city in southern France] + fleuriste" was not time well spent then

xp

...or maybe I just did it wrong!

could be your search was too restrictive with the quotemarks and +, i just googled fleuriste chuma and it popped up

Is that a sliver of a gothic arch I see on the far right?

― nickn, donderdag 15 april 2021 18:39

nickn was actually halfway there, that was the big clue, I guess: a section of the 18th century aqueduct

nickn was almost all the way there, especially once Montpellier was mentioned it just needed to be poked over the line. There was too much out there already to give any more!

pretty sure i googled 'montpellier arch' and i didn't see any photos of the aqueduct - now i know what i'm looking for i see one or two. should've made good on my promise upthread and used yandex, there's loads on there.

cherry blossom playing a hard game now, no longer enough just to name the city, they want the exact spot! I looked around the Arc de Triomphe in Montpellier but when I realised it wasnt that I kind of gave up on it

cherry blossom playing a hard game now, no longer enough just to name the city, they want the exact spot!

Has anyone made any progress on identifying the two men? My gut is telling me they're not locals, but not getting much of a reading on how far they've traveled in from

what is the skinny guy stooping over to inspect?