Resident Wellness Day: Splatter Painting, Leva, & Escape Room

This week I'll only put in four days at the family practice clinic, because Tuesday I had off for Wellness Day -- essentially an annual day of fun activities sponsored by our residency program! This year our group decided to create splatter paintings, go out for lunch, and try out an escape room.

apparently the family practice clinic thought I was on a wilderness retreat...close enough

We spent the first half of the day at a departmental research workshop, then headed off to start our activities around noon. Our first stop was 4Cats Art Studio in Riverbend Square, where we'd registered for a Jackson Pollock-esque paint splatter party. After a little reassurance from the friendly manager that the parties weren't just for five year olds, we suited up in aprons (child-sized, hmm) and selected our paint colours.

After painting a base colour on our canvases we headed with paint palates and brushes into the "splatter room" -- which was a work of art in itself, its walls and floor covered in bright splatters of paint.

We set our canvases on benches lining the walls and, after watching a brief demonstration, set to work flinging brushfuls of paint at them. For the next minute the room was silent, apart from thwacks of paint -- everyone was a little too focused on the task at hand.

I was pretty impressed with the results! The splatter paintings ended up looking really neat and each person's turned out to be so unique! When we pick them up (after glazing) I think we should hang them all together in our residents room :)

Our next task was to create a group painting on a larger canvas laid out on the floor. Instead of paintbrushes, we used paint-loaded syringes and paint-filled balloons to splatter the big one...which proved quite a bit messier (thankfully the paint was water soluble!). The plan for this canvas is to have it cut in half and stretched as two smaller canvases -- one to gift to our program director and the other to hang in our residents room.

After working up an appetite painting we headed to Leva for lunch, which, besides having delicious food, is interesting in that it's essentially a metal box that's been renovated into a really nice little cafe. The weather was perfect for sitting out on the patio with our pizza, salads, macarons, and iced coffees.

After lunch we headed over to Breakout Entertainment, a live action escape game that opened last September. The premise is that you, along with up to five others, are locked in a room that's outfitted as a crime or mystery scene and have 45 minutes to solve the mystery and find a key to unlock the door. Of the four available rooms we chose the "Secret Lab", which apparently is the easiest -- though still only has a 4% success rate.

Unfortunately no photos were permitted (and I wouldn't want to spoil it anyways!) but I can tell you that it was a ton of fun! And definitely tricker than we'd expected. The timer counting down and the creepy music-box soundtrack playing in the background didn't do much to help concentration either. Though we exploited both of the two available hints we unfortunately didn't manage to break out of the room before the clock ran out.

When the staff came in at the end to walk us through the puzzle, we realized that succeeding requires impressive attention to detail (probably the reason we failed...) -- though strangely we did manage to open two combination locks by pure luck and hack one of the puzzles using a pen instead of the proper tool (which was locked in another one of the boxes that we couldn't get open). Overall, the room was well set up (think motorized dresser that moves aside to reveal a secret room sort of thing) and though the price is a little steep at $25 per person, we think it'd be worth coming back to try another room!

Even with our escape thwarted, we all had a pretty excellent day -- suffice it to say that Wellness Day served its purpose!