Day two

Time for day two!. Thankfully for my daily schedule, the daily challenge is released at pre-determined dates. Today it was 3:00 GMT+1, same for tomorrow. On the fourth it will be at 4:30 GMT+1, and skipping ahead a little… 12:30AM GMT+1 on the 12th?!

Bit odd, but I’m not going to complain if I get a bit more time to write these posts out.

Unlike yesterday I actually completed this task before attempting this write-up. The challenge was released while I was still on the clock, so I took my lunch-break to do a fun little OSINT challenge. Unlike yesterday, todays challenge only has one question. I did end up needing a bit of assistance to get the answer in time for my lunch-break to end, but we’ll touch more on that later.

Onto the question!

Question one

Christmas is approaching and you’re feeling nostalgic for your summer holidays. You come across this photo of one of the iconic places from your trip. One of the members of your group, who particularly enjoyed the visit, shared her thoughts as well as other photos online, including one showing the chandelier under the entrance porch.

What is this person’s first name and what is the green and red object hanging from the chandelier? A room with a ceiling covered in international flags, including those of Canada, Germany, China, Sweden, and the black-and-white Breton flag. A small hanging globe lantern is suspended from the ceiling. The walls below are decorated with photos, patches, and additional flags

We get a bit of a story today. We can pull these details out of all that text to nail down what we’re really looking for:

  1. This photo and others were shared online somewhere.
  2. One of the photos shared by a ‘member of our group’ includes a chandelier under the entrance porch.
  3. A green and red object is hanging from the chandelier, which we need to identify.

Our first task is to identify where the image is taken.

I’ve played a handful of games of GeoGuessr with a friend before, and I know that one of the best hints when playing is seeing the flag of the country you’re dropped in.

Unfortunately for us, the image we’re given has… many flags on it. Some of the most prominent are; Canada, Germany, China, and Sweden. There are some that I couldn’t identify (sorry Vexology nerds) off the bat, but maybe we’ll find a way to identify them all.

My first step was to download the image and run it through [images.google.com]. I ended up doing this from my phone while I made myself some lunch, and to my surprise I got a hit right away!

For various reasons my phone is always always connected to a French VPN. This will be important in a bit!

I didn’t get an exact match to the image, but I did get a lot of similar looking photos taken around a small Café in California: A screenshot of Google’s ‘Visual matches’ panel showing multiple photos of a café interior covered in international flags on the ceiling and walls. Each thumbnail displays colorful flags and decorated dining areas, with sources including Atlas Obscura and Tripadvisor.

You’ll note that TripAdvisor is in French in those images (Bare in mind these screenshots were taken later without a France-based VPN connection). After matching a few of the flags (and the globe) from the source image we can confirm the location: Bagdad Café.

So what is the Bagdad Café? It’s a small café somewhere in California that has plenty of flags, bills, and scribbles on walls left by past patrons. I tried to add Bagdad Café to my search result and found it’s also the title of a film from 1987. It’s described as;

Bagdad Cafe (sometimes Bagdad Café, titled Out of Rosenheim in Germany) is a 1987 English-language West German film directed by Percy Adlon. It is a comedy-drama set in a remote truck stop and motel in the Mojave Desert in the U.S. state of California Inspired by Carson McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), the film centers on two women who have recently separated from their husbands, and the blossoming friendship that ensues.

Sounds neat (And well before my time). Though this does answer why my phone with it’s French VPN got a hit right away, and why so many of the reviews on TripAdvisor are in French. The film appears to have been pretty popular in France and Germany, which is why many of the people going to the Café appear to be French and German tourists.

So what does that give us? We have a French TripAdvisor domain with plenty of photos that confirm this is where the original image was taken, but we need to answer some specific questions.

We’re looking for a photo, or series of photos taken by someone who visited the Bagdad Café, where one of those photos clearly shows something green and red hanging from the chandelier under the entrance porch.

After getting into some rabbitholes going to the café’s official website (I recommend this for the early web 1.0 aesthetic, less so for the MAGA stuff) I decided to just search for “Bagdad Café” on Instagram. I found some photos posted by a travel account that happened to contain this image: Add alt-text

The poster (who I’m not naming) had their first name on their account, and the green-red object appears to be a hat.

I entered this in and….

Nope. Wrong answer.

Maybe it’s a tophat? Or top-hat?

Still not correct.

I was starting to run out of time on my lunch-break, so I took a peek into the OSINT4Fun Discord and saw someone else was stuck. There was someone else there who had seemingly already solved the task and offered to let us know if we were on the right path!

I showed them the above photo and told them what I found, here’s the sparknotes:

Me: Found this instagram post which shows… something? Looks like a hat
Me: But doesn’t seem to be the answer alongside the posters name

The Helpful Random Discord User: Okay so you’re definitely on the right track regarding the object
The Helpful Random Discord User: Nevertheless, the review is posted on a more …global platform so to speak

With that helpful hint I decided to check Google Maps, and the reviews for the Bagdad Café which were public.

There are a lot of reviews and photos of the inside of the Café on Google Maps. I scrolled for a long time to try find an exact match to the original image, before broadening my scope and looking for a clearer image of the Green and red hat hanging outside.

With two minutes left on my lunch I finally found this image: Add alt-text

I didn’t actually find a written review from Denise, but that was the answer!

Conclusion

The feeling of clicking submit for what felt like the 100th time (I started entering the name of everyone who left a photo on Google Maps and the word ‘hat’) and seeing the page reload to show me that I had completed the challenge was amazing. I kept glancing at the clock and thinking to myself ‘Okay, I need to finish this in 2 minutes’. So that feeling of submitting the answer felt like a weight off my shoulders.

Massive shoutout to cR0w for making sure I keep this daily streak alive (We’re only on day two, so don’t celebrate too much), and to that random Discord user for helping narrow the scope. I’m excited for day three!