Results tagged “watsonadventures”

Ah, Valentine's Day: refuge of the uninspired lover and bane of the singleton's year. Fear not! We present our annual offbeat V-day guide, guaranteed to add some flair to the red-heart holiday (whose idea was it to put a celebration of love and relationships smack in the middle of the great gray beast February anyway, we ask you?).

This weekend, this Phillyist (along with my wife, co-editor Star, and her sister) had a ball running around the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a Watson Adventures scavenger hunt. Watson doesn't run traditional scavenger hunts, where you have to find and bring back certain items (the Watson people were careful to point out that we should not pick up any vases or paintings while we were in the museum). Instead, their hunts consist of a series of riddle-like questions which can only be answered by visiting specific places and examining your surroundings carefully. In this case, the theme was nudity (woo hoo!) and the stuff we were examining was pieces of fine art. Before the hunt begins, you break up into small teams and come up with a team name (which can be important, too - but more on that later). Getting a good combination of folks with different talents and areas of knowledge on your team is a good idea (hopefully you'll also have compatible personalities - being able to work together is also important!). Although you don't get extra points for being first to get done, you do lose points for being late to the finish line, so speed and ability to navigate is important. Answering the questions requires an observant eye, clever thinking, and knowledge of various types of trivia (you'd think art trivia would have been the most important for our hunt, but there was also stuff about TV shows and Christian saints). You might have to work through a bit of wordplay in your head, then crouch down to read something at the base of a statue, then run on to the next room and look for a naked man in chains.

Try not to panic - but the dreaded pink, red and doily-clad holiday, St. Valentine's, is only a week away. If you're on the lookout for something to do other than you traditional dinner and a movie, Philly's got some less-than-ordinary Valentine themed attractions going on. (And to our single brethren, these events are also singles friendly):