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A friend of mine has recently sent me a couple of strange post cards from his recent traveling, and I can honestly not make head or tail of it. I would really like to meet up with him in person, because so far I've only met him 'virtually' (We bumped into each other through some online game.) Well, I would like to meet him, provided he is at least somewhere in Europe. While he's sent me a date, he was not nearly as clear about the location.

I would appreciate if you could provide me with any help. Can you tell me

  • Is he at least in Europe?
  • Can you maybe even name the town/city/place I'm supposed to meet him?
  • Bonus points for any more accurate geographic location you can give me! ( I have the suspicion that you would need Google, Bing or the like for that. )

Well, and below is all the information I have. Four post cards. I've sorted them in the order I received them.

CARD 1

CARD 1

CARD 3

CARD 4 (fixed)

Puzzle notes

The aim of the puzzle above is to name a real-world location plus a reasoning how this could be (without ambiguity) deduced from the cards above. This is not a "guess where I am" type of question.

The city can be determined with only the images, but a closer location will likely only be found by either "local knowledge" (if you happen to live in that area) or by "Googling around" with the information you have at that point.

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    $\begingroup$ Are you counting England as part of Europe? ;) $\endgroup$
    – Ian MacDonald
    Apr 10, 2017 at 16:01
  • $\begingroup$ @IanMacDonald Despite the Brits mostly thinking differently, yes. But unfortunately my friend has obviously had his (br)exit already, and I don't know where he is now. ;c) $\endgroup$
    – BmyGuest
    Apr 10, 2017 at 16:02
  • $\begingroup$ Is there a missing dashed line in the fourth diagram, from the yellow vertex at the southwest to the blue one two above it at the west? $\endgroup$
    – Gareth McCaughan ♦
    Apr 11, 2017 at 1:35

1 Answer 1

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"She" is clearly the beautiful

(blue) Danube: source in the Black Forest, delta on the Black Sea, something you might "get over" (but not if frozen or flooded, perhaps) or "look down on". Most of the countries through which the Danube flows assign genders to their nouns, and the Danube is male for some and female for others; perhaps that's why "her (or him?)".

In

Vienna

there is

a bar called Sansibar on an island in the Danube.

I'm pretty sure this is the place where we are to meet. Each postcard

is from a different European(ish) city: London, Munich (the picture is of the Olympiastadion and the text refers to the Oktoberfest), Moscow (see below), and Vienna (see above).

And I think the graphs

which are all isomorphic apart from one missing edge (see comments to the original question)

indicate

the regions in the game Diplomacy ("I always thought myself a master diplomat"), yellow/orange vertices corresponding to land and blue to sea. Edges indicate adjacency. The "special" vertex in each graph of course corresponds to the city the postcard is from.

I am not sure why

Moscow is apparently labelled MOB. If it's Cyrillic it would correspond to MOV in roman characters, but that isn't how either the English or the Russian name of Moscow begins. There are airports whose 3-letter codes are MOB and MOV but neither is anywhere near Russia.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think you've found a very likely place to meet my friend, but I'm not going to book any flights before I'm not sure it's what he's pointing at... (In essence, all points are correct, but that is the "self-verification" step of the puzzle. ;c) ) $\endgroup$
    – BmyGuest
    Apr 10, 2017 at 18:31
  • $\begingroup$ Oh, I completely understand that I haven't solved it yet even if I've got the right answer. $\endgroup$
    – Gareth McCaughan ♦
    Apr 10, 2017 at 18:33
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, it makes we wonder if I should have made that part (the second one) harder... Well, PuzzlingSE is always my "test playground" ;c) $\endgroup$
    – BmyGuest
    Apr 10, 2017 at 18:33
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    $\begingroup$ For your 'not sure' part, I believe you've misread it, and that it's an S at the end. $\endgroup$
    – Rob
    Apr 11, 2017 at 5:32
  • $\begingroup$ Well done. (Too easy?) Yes, it was MOS and (I believe) I used the standard abbreviations from the (English) game board, but I'm not 100% sure. The missing link is fixed as well, so you can edit your answer into final (accepted) state if you please. $\endgroup$
    – BmyGuest
    Apr 11, 2017 at 6:51

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