On July 22, 2018 a regular Quiztime follower and contributor Ludo Block shared a new quiz with us. The objective was simple, as always. Locate the place, provide the name of the restaurant and the price of a beer. Please refer to the embedded link below for the original post:
If you’d like to test your own geolocation skills, then don’t read any further and rather go to the Twitter post above, open the picture and try your luck. Don’t scroll further down as I will be discussing how I found it and I’ll give you some tips and share some tricks on how you can find such places by yourself quite quickly.
Warning spoilers ahead
How I was able to tell the place
First I would like to share how I found the place myself, this might not be helpful for most people that’s why I will not spend too much time dwelling on that.
Anyone who opens the tweet will see that I was the first person to reply and that I was able to tell the city even before I started investigating. Guess what, I have been there myself. Therefore, for me it was particularly easy to recognize the place. Though I didn’t go to the same restaurant I was able to tell with absolute certainty which country this was and my gut told me that this looked a lot, I mean a lot, like the Skopje Bit Pazar where I spent several days wandering around. I only had to confirm it by going over several restaurants around that area using Google Maps, Foursquare and TripAdvisor.
Conclusion: my gut feeling was right.
What if you have no clue where this is?
You are probably thinking, “To hell with that, I have never been there, how should I know where to look?”
That’s a fair point, but the good news is you can quickly find out even when you have never been there or if you have no clue about what’s written there.
The first thing we want to do is having a very close look at the picture, as there is a lot written on this picture. For this, open the image from Twitter and add :orig to the .jpg suffix of the picture.
This will give you the picture in its original size. You can also try to add :large to it. Once done you will see this image.
If it’s still too small for you, you can always use the InVID plugin to magnify certain areas of the picture.
Now let’s see what we can use to identify the location. The first thing we notice is probably the presence of a strange alphabet. I think most of you will think it’s Russian, Ukrainian or maybe Serbian. There are also things written in English, which might suggest that this is a touristic area.
To be sure about the language I recommend you do your homework a bit on Cyrillic alphabets (no, they aren’t all the same). You might want to look into common Cyrillic letters, letters that all Cyrillic alphabets have in common. Luckily there’s a Wikipedia article that lists them for you so you don’t need to go after it yourself.
Don’t worry, you actually don’t really need to identify which alphabet this is, in case you were wondering, I just recommend you to study it as it is a very handy tool to identify locations.
Currency
First way to identify the location, by its currency. Zoom in and see if you can see a price listed.
They have a price in euros and another price in ден. Now the question is what is ден? You can use Google Translate or the Wikipedia article on Cyrillic alphabets to decipher the transliteration to the Latin alphabet when you see this on a picture. There is a plethora of methods to decipher which currency this is, here’s one:
In case you thought this was Russian (I don’t blame you) you could go and find the exact letters on the Russian Google Translator keyboard, then use it to query Google:
It happens to be the Macedonian denar (sorry Greeks, I meant to say the FYROM denar).
Alternative methods: Food, beer, payment methods, language.
Obviously the best way is by searching for the currency. It will save you a lot of time. But here you have some other hints that could’ve helped you guess the right location. Not necessarily on its own, but when combined together.
The language. Trying to decipher the language is probably the most secure way, second only to the currency.
You can try to find out by searching for the brands and the local dishes. But this can trick you. E.g. Laško Zlatorog it’s a Slovenian brand, it’s not sold in Macedonia exclusively. Halkbank, obviously no one will think this is Turkey, but they’re also active in Serbia, so that could trick you as well.
Local dishes such as the ones below. Again, tricky, it can point you to Serbia so I wouldn’t recommend solely relying on this.
The only dish that would probably really help you out would be Gravche / Гравче as it’s less common.
How to find out the city and the exact location?
For this there’s no real straight forward solution. You’d need to apply some common sense. Where in the country are they more likely to write stuff in English? In touristic places, most probably.
Feel free to check TripAdvisor for some ideas where to start searching. You will see that the most popular places for tourists are around Ohrid, but you can go over it quite quickly and you will realize almost immediately that it isn’t there. Ohrid is quite small and there aren’t that many places where this could be. Some of the other places on the list are in Skopje, such as Vodno (a mountain, probably not there), Matka (a canyon, idem). Then you’ll see the Old Bazaar in the center of Skopje which is a more likely candidate.
From this point it’s just trial and error. Go over as many restaurants as you can. You always risk not to be searching in the right city, there’s no remedy to this but luckily Macedonia is a very small country. Skopje is small as well and the bazaar is even smaller. It’s nothing compared to cities like Istanbul, Tehran or even Paris for that matter.
As you can see above it’s not so big. When you start looking at it, you will see that most restaurants are concentrated in the southern part of the bazaar which is far more touristic and closer to the city center. The northern parts are more for groceries, it has a big fruit market and they sell some cheap clothes. It’s mostly frequented by the local Albanians and Muslims.
Try to zoom as closely as possible so you will see all restaurants and bars in that area. If you don’t zoom in close enough, chances are not all establishments are being shown on the map. You can also specifically search for restaurants and bars in Google Maps.
At this point I just tried as many places as I could until I got to a place called Snoshti Minav. When I saw the picture I saw some similarities.
I knew it was not this place but the place diagonally opposite of this restaurant. It turned out to be a place called Serdarot. You can look for yourself, you will recognize it immediately.
Method #2:
I just realized it now, but reverse image search did give me an exact match. It didn’t match the picture, but it did list the restaurant as one of the top results. I didn’t realize this until I finished writing this article.
Note to myself, never automatically dismiss the results that don’t contain images.
Question 2, how much does the beer cost?
To verify this, you can check Google Maps to see if there’s a picture of the menu. Check if the restaurant has a site or if that’s not the case you can always try TripAdvisor or Foursquare.
In this case only Foursquare had a picture of the menu. It was last uploaded in February 2018, not long ago, so I went with that price. 80 denars.
Edit: suggestion from a Twitter user
Someone on Twitter shared his method for solving the quiz which seems to be quite quick. I didn’t try it out for this particular location. But having used it on different occasions I can confirm it can often be very effective and efficient.
Edit #2: Suggestion from Fiete Stegers
Another suggestion came in, I didn’t try this out though I had a quick look at the Cashback site. Feel free to test it yourself.
Conclusion
As always try to limited your search area. Look for hints that will point you into the right country. Once you know you’re in the right country and city you might have to do a bit of hard work. You can’t always be that lucky and have an exact match in Yandex or Google Reverse Image search.
