On Wednesday, Intern Europe organised a “treasure hunt”. The name is somewhat misleading, because unfortunately there was no great treasure to be found. But it was all a bit in the pirate theme.
We met at 6 pm in front of the Belfast City Hall and were then divided by intern Europe into teams of 5-6 people. I was in a team with a German named Laura (who is doing a different apprenticeship) and three poles. In order for everyone to understand something, we should speak in English the whole time. Great for me, because that’s the reason why I’m here, but unfortunately it turned out that the Poles did not know much more than school English which made communicating a bit complicated.
After the geting divided into teams, we were given an envelope by the organising team with the riddles and an envelope with hints if we didn’t get any further. Laura and I immediately began to look at the brain teasers. To solve everything we had to explore a large part of the city centre and find certain places and answer questions about them. The first puzzle, finding and counting sheep, was quite simple if you didn’t fall asleep. Lastly, we should rearrange an anagram to find the pub where everyone was supposed to meet. So when we wanted to go to the first station, we noticed the Poles had been overzealous or maybe they didn’t understand the instructions and had already opened the envelope with the tips. That would have cost us 40 of 400 points. Luckily we were able to clarify that the punishment was not imposed on us, because we had not yet started.
We chattering the stations and had to deal with various tasks such as finding out the names of landmarks, the Irish and Scottish names of the Ulster University, people on the street asking for help and, most importantly, making lots of photos. 5 minutes before the end we reached the pub and were able to relax a bit after walking (and sometimes racing) for 2 hours. There was a free drink for everyone and a small buffet (unfortunately without many vegan/vegetarian options). For the first time in the evening we talked a little bit of German. In the following award ceremony it turned out that we had reached third place! 🙂 Unfortunately, there was only one prize for first place. The entire team received a £5 voucher for the cinema. It was a very nice evening!
