Real Life Room Escapes - Tkalnia Zagadek, Lodz

Fancy paying to walk into an unlit room with blacked out windows an
d the door locked behind you?

How about having a 45-minute timer tick down as you try to piece together mysterious elements of the disappearance of an unknown person in order to discover a key to let you out of the room?

Well, a new trend of real-life room escapes is popping up across lots of countries, and I decided to check one out for myself.

Marketed as an alternative source of small group entertainment, forget bowling, cinema or traditional team-building activities, and tackle both mental and physical challenges presented to you in the locked room. Enter the mind of a missing or murdered person, find clues and hints to get you closer to unlocking the mystery and then the door.

Put on your critical thinking hat, take a step back to look from another perspective, and become your very own Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Jonathan Creek (female fictional detectives are available), and unravel the secrets of the room within the time limit.

With two others I visited Tkalnia Zagadek in Łódź, Poland, the title of which translates roughly as Puzzle Factory - a Polish play-on-words as Łódź has a strong industrial past.

We entered the Insomnia room and were immediately plunged into the dark and told to search for flashlights and clues to get out. Having to solve a huge variety of challenges to open cupboards and undo padlocks, shining lights on certain objects, resolving chess games and leafing through books, all in the attempt to find a key to get out of the room, was simply exhilarating.

The experience was immense: thrilling, nerve-wracking, panic-inducing, stimulating, but also exceedingly pleasing when you figured something out and moved on to the next step, piecing together something you discovered 20 minutes ago with something scribbled on the wall or under a desk, unlocking a cupboard and edging ever closer to escaping the locked room.

I would highly recommend this type of activity, and if you ever visit Łódź then Tkalnia Zagadek is the place to go. The staff were very friendly and helpful and made sure that our time there was just perfect. I will certainly be going back to confront the second room there.

And the best thing about this type of adventure activity? It's hugely interactive, it lets every member of your group take part, it lasts for 45 minutes and definitely leaves you wanting more, and afterwards you can go out for drinks and dinner on a high, whether you solve it or not!

Enjoy! To find out more about Tkalnia Zagadek follow this link:

http://tkalniazagadek.pl/en/

Sherlock Showcases Squandered Stash

Every year thousands of items are lost on buses, trains, tubes and in taxis, unsurprising in London, a metropolis with over 8 million inhabitants.

That new smartphone that you were proudly displaying to your companions; the umbrella left under a seat and promptly remembered once back outside under the rain clouds; the hat that was too hot to wear once inside and sheltered from the cold; the teddy that the crying child just realised went all the way to the end of the line.

All these sorts of items turn up to the Lost Property Office in their thousands, and most have a banal or explainable story behind them. For others, however, this certainly is not the case.

I'm always at a loss to understand how people can leave behind certain pieces of clothing. Do they remove their trousers on the tube and walk home in their underwear, or was it 'Bring a spare pair to work' Day and they just happened to slip out of a bag.

How about prosthetic limbs? A wedding dress? A lollipop man's sign? If you can come up with the reasoning for any of these then I'd love to hear it.

All of this is in light of the lost property office in Baker Street opening its doors for its 80th anniversary and showcasing some of the weird and wonderful belongings that have been forgotten on the network. The computer system used to deal with the treasure trove is very fittingly named Sherlock after this street's most famous occupant.

The good news is that a surprisingly large percentage of items are returned to their rightful owners, and the ones that don't find their way home are recycled or donated to charity whenever possible. So, be comforted by knowing that one chappy has been made happy by the tearful toddler's loss.

For more information and some interesting pictures follow this link.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-30213457