It’s been a while since my last write up - busy with uni and such - but I’m ready to get stuck into the latest challenge. On the surface this looked similar to the last post I wrote up here but turned out to be quite a different solve. Let’s get started!
It‘s @Quiztime 🥳
— Julia Bayer (@bayer_julia) November 22, 2021
👁 What are we looking at?
✍️ Reply to me with your answer
🤝 Reply to all for collaboration
🌈 Good luck with the #MondayQuiz pic.twitter.com/OTrrYJA0cX
To begin with, a quick visual analysis shows it’s somewhere in Germany since I can see an U-Bahn logo (I wrongly assumed only Berlin had an U-Bahn system but later found this was wrong - for editorial reasons and flow of reading, I’ve made amendments), and by noticing traffic is all on the right hand side it means the image doesn’t need flipping to solve. Apart from this, I didn’t have much of a lead - a Yandex reverse image search for the whole thing didn’t yield anything of use, but I was able to reverse image search the red A logo, and from this I found out it was a generic sign for an Apotheke which is a German pharmacy.
So at this stage we don’t have a great deal of information, apart from the fact we’re in a German city with an U-Bahn system where a street exit is next to a pharmacy. At this stage it’s hard where to go from next, however there is another sign that’s only just readable, and that’s the sign next to the pharmacy - let’s take a closer look:
The sign here appears to read Salon Martin - a quick search shows that there are lots of these dotted around Germany. Although this may assist a bit later, it’s not good enough on its own to narrow down our search to the scope we need.
At this point I was honestly pretty stuck; all I’ve found to go off is the U-Bahn sign, the pharmacy and Salon Martin - some pointless searching got me nowhere really, this really isn’t enough information. I saw that the numberplates on the cars could possibly be points of interest, although I knew this would be quite complicated so wanted to see if I could find anything else beforehand.
In the middle of what I’d call my ‘pointless Googling’, I found something interesting - on the Wikipedia entry for ‘U-Bahn’, there was a handy graphic showing the different logos for the 4 different U-Bahn systems in Germany (note: I said earlier that I wasn’t aware of U-Bahn systems outside of Berlin, but this is where I found out otherwise). The logos, although similar, do have differences which I found to be great in moving onto the next steps of the investigation:
Visually the logos are very similar - however it’s possible to notice key features of each one. The Hamburg logo includes a thinner U, the Nürmberg ‘U’ is quite close to the edges. The Berlin and München (or Munich) logos are similar, however the Munich logo is more rounded and the U doesn’t quite go to the edges as much - based on this assesment, as you can see, I determined it was the Munich U-Bahn
This is brilliant - now, I not only know of Salon Martin, bur a Salon Martin in Munich near a U-Bahn stop and a pharmacy - surely I’ll be able to get something now?
Sure enough, the first result on Google maps was for a location on Max-Planck-Straße
And although it was hard to line the shot up, I could confirm without doubt that it was the right location - matching a combination of the U-Bahn stop, the building on the left and the thing in the distance we are looking at.
The original question asked ‘What are we looking at?’, so it would be a safe bet to assume the object of interest is the big thing in the distance, which is Maximilianeum - the Bavarian parliament building.
I hope you had as much fun following along and reading as I did solving the challenge! I hope to get more of these writeups done, I’m quite busy with uni at the moment, not to mention they take a while to write up… especially when I have to go back and retrace steps since I didn’t capture any content in the first place.
Until next time!