SCAVENGING FOR FUN

NICEST GIFT OF THE WEEK: look at the lovely roses Maxy got me

Yesterday was awesome. In the morning, we watched 'Eagle vs. Shark', which was not awesome. It's a quirky indie film from New Zealand, with Jermaine from 'Flight of the Conchords' in it and it was kind of fun, but brilliant.

After lunch, we went to the National Gallery - somewhere I'm ashamed to say we have yet to visit - to do a scavenger hunt.

I get an email once a week, letting me know about events coming up in DC and offering cut-price tickets and stuff. That's how we went to the baseball in Baltimore and the basketball the other day. And the scavenger hunt yesterday.

On our way to the Gallery (we walked all the way!), we came across a game of hockey being played on rollerblades in front of the OEOB, just by the White House, which was pretty cool.

However, the scavenger hunt was SO much cooler! Maxy and I were a team of two, though there were lots of other teams, mostly of four (all adults). We were met by a representative of the scavenger hunt company who set the scene of a murder that had been committed in the gallery.

She wasn't very into it, but I was! Basically, a curator had been murdered and some random numbers had been found in his drawer, along with a diary with blanks in some of the sentences. We had to fill in the blanks in the sentences by solving clues found in paintings in the gallery.

We were given a time limit of two hours, and dashed off to solve the mystery. It was SO fun and a really good way to see the gallery for the first time, because you're running around everywhere, so get to see what is there to see, so that you can come back at your leisure and go straight to the bits of interest.

The hunt was really tricky and we found some of the clues quite difficult to solve, which we really liked. And you had to have a bit of outside knowledge to solve them, too - with some clues, it wasn't enough just to look at the painting and spot an object or whatever - so it was a real challenge.

The numbers left in the curator's drawer corresponded with the numbers of our answers, so when we had all our answers, we took the first letter from each of the numbered answers in question and that revealed the killer.

We were one of the first teams to finish and then, when all the answers were marked and points totted up - it was very tense - we were in joint first place! I thought the fact that we'd done it faster would mean we would win, but unfortunately the time limit seemed singularly spurious.

Instead, we had to go head-to-head with the - 3-person - team in a tie-break. The question was: In what year was the boardgame Clue created?

I love Clue(do) and was sure I'd seen an anniversary edition out recently, so we said 1958 and the other team said 1964, I think. The answer was 1948, so we won!!

the proud victors with their prizes

I so enjoyed the scavenger hunt and definitely want to do more. There's one in the Museum of American History, which I think would be awesome.

High on our great victory, we hopped and skipped just up the road to Chinatown, to see 'Role Models', which was every bit as brilliant as we'd hoped. It was just great.

This morning, I helped out at Sunday School and then we had a nice webcam chat with our friends Matt and Jilly, before watching 'Recount' - the HBO movie about how Al Gore lost the 2000 election.

It's a film we've been wanting to see for ages, but had to wait until the Democrats were back in power, before we could bear to watch how the Republicans basically stole the presidency for Bush. It was so depressing, but brilliant. The thing that interested me the most was how anti-democracy the Republicans were when there was a query about the result in Florida. According to the film (which was made from a liberal perspective but claims to be telling the truth), the Republicans didn't want any kind of re-vote or recount, even though there had been critical errors in the voting process, so the result was potentially wrong. Bunch of cowboys.