Passing the time on your long flight

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Unless you’re like Gadling blogger Grant, who might have been genetically engineered by Boeing, it’s inevitable you’re going to get bored on a flight sooner or later. This is especially true on transcontinental flights, where you’re guaranteed to be stuck inside your cylindrical prison for at least 6 hours if not longer. No matter how many awful in-flight movies, magazines and episodes of The Wire on your iPod you have to amuse yourself, you can still expect to get bored eventually.

For the gaming-obsessed bloggers at Joystiq, the tedium of these long flights is just an opportunity to invent some creative ways to pass the time. If you’re desperate to hold back the boredom (or just cannot sleep on planes like me) consider the following (questionable) game suggestions:

  • BING! – This game only requires a bag of airline pretzels or snack mix. Start with three pretzels and set the rest to the side as the “house.” Each round bet one, two or three pretzels on which side of the airplane cabin will be first to ring their flight attendant call button. If you guess right, take as many pretzels as you bet from the house. If you lose, put the pretzels back. Keep playing until you’ve either won or lost all the pretzels from the middle.
  • In-flight Catalog Scavenger Hunt – As one Joystiq commenter suggests, compete against a friend to find the most ridiculous items from the in-flight catalog. The person to find the item with highest cost-to-uselessness ratio wins. Keep your eyes peeled for the remote control dragonfly.
  • Cellphone standoff – As the plane begins to land, try to guess the number of cellphones that will be turned on/make noise between the moment the wheels touch the ground to when the seatbelt light is turned off.

We don’t necessarily suggest playing these games unless you’re desperate, but with flight delays and long waits on the tarmac all but standard these days, it’s always good to have a few backup options. What do you do to amuse yourself on long flights?

More office time killers: Lufthansa’s Virtual Pilot

by Grant Martin on

If you’re tired of reading through election coverage during your lunch hour, flex your brain a bit and give Lufthansa‘s Virtual Pilot a spin. It’s a geography quiz similar to the UNESCO game I posted late last year, loosely based around the cities and hubs from which Lufthansa flies. Despite being an obvious ad for the German product, it’s a fun way to kill a little time and brag to your friends about how high of a score you got. If I didn’t have a friend who was a geography genius I’d send the link out among my so called “travel society,” but I know his mental database of cities and countries will run all of the fun. Alas, there are worse impediments.

The fun thing about this quiz is that it’s given in three stages. In the first, you get countries and city locations from which you can can choose. In the second you only get country borders, while in the final you only get continents. Make sure you click the destination you want — even though the jet is heading in the direction of your cursor it won’t land unless you select a region.

My first score was 25399. You shouldn’t have any trouble beating it, but I’m only taking your first score.

Test your UNESCO World Heritage Site geography

by Grant Martin on

We dabble in sustainable travel once in a while here at Gadling, but if you really want to get into the science of the process, there are some excellent, well-maintained blogs out on the interwebs. Both Friends of World Heritage and National Geographic’s Intelligent Traveler have dedicated professional staff to keep you informed on the happenings of eco-travel around the planet.

Friends of World Heritage has a great little map game to get you started, which is a combination of geographical and UNESCO site data. It’s a fun, educational way to test your knowledge of world geography as well as get the message out about the endangered sites around the globe.

The first time I played I got stumped on the North America stage (in my defense, I got some really random locations in Mexico), but on my second try was not able to get past stage twelve, which is wicked hard.

Give yourself a few minutes over lunch and take a gander. My top score is 718537 points which should be pretty easy to beat. You can find the tool directly off their homepage.

Polish fortune-telling holiday: Get a candle, a key and a right shoe

by Jamie Rhein on

Tonight is St. Andrew’s Eve where fortunes are told if you happen to be in Poland or around a large Polish community. These days, the fortunes are male or female friendly, but in the past were female fare. Also called Andrzejki, this holiday is thanks to St. Andrew (as in one of the disciples) who is the patron saint.

The night of fortune-telling designed to predict a person’s fate in love, wealth and marriage involves a bit of practice it seems–and a vivid imagination. The love and wealth prediction is the trickiest. People gather at parties where each tells the others’ fortunes based on information gathered from melted wax and shadows.

Here’s what you do:

  1. Get a candle. Melt the wax
  2. Turn off the lights
  3. Pour the melted wax through the hole of a key into a bowl of water. Naturally, get a key with a large hole.
  4. When the wax hardens into a shape, look at it, or the shadow that it makes to see what that person’s fortune is.

This is what you can tell if you are an intuitive fortune-teller type. The person’s country of origin (if the person speaks Polish and if you are in Poland, this might be a safe bet), the person’s future love match, and what the person’s profession will be.

If this sounds a little dicey and complicated, try shoe throwing. It’s another St. Andrew’s Eve tradition. Here’s how you do this one. Everybody at the party takes off his or her right shoe. Stand in a line across a room from a door. Throw the shoe towards the door. Whoever gets his or her shoe closer to the door will get married first. I would say if you don’t really want to get married first, don’t lob it. A gentle toss will suffice. You can always say, “Ooops, it slipped.”

Here’s another way to play this one. Starting at the wall across from the door, one person puts the heel of her shoe against the wall. Another person puts the heal of her shoe against the toe of the other person’s shoe. Another person repeats the step with her shoe. Whichever shoe is the one that reaches the door is the one that the owner will get married first. Clear as mud?

I looked around to see if I can find a particular St. Andrew’s Eve event for you to go to. Nope. I did find several articles talking about it. Here’s one from the Warsaw Voice where I culled my how tos. You can practice your Polish with this one. The cities in the U.S. and Canada mentioned as having large Polish communities are Detroit, San Francisco, Toronto and New York. This article describes even more fortune-telling games.

Test Your African Geography Knowledge with Statetris: Africa

by Justin Glow on

Okay, we’ve got the original Testris-Geography mashup game called Statetris for the U.S., and then things got a bit tougher (for me) with the follow-up, Statetris: Europe. Now we’ve got new one: Statetris Africa. This one’s a doozy.

Africa is tough! I’m struggling to put countries like Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire in their correct places — and I was a Geography major in school! Problem is, even if you know where these countries are physically located, they may not be facing the correct way in the game. Just like in real Tetris, you’ve got to rotate the falling countries until they’re correctly orientated. [via]