Today I went paintballing in San Jose with AeroFS.
It was my first time playing paintball. The same held true for four of the other players. It was more fun (and less painful) than I had expected. We were all given jumpsuits (to keep the paint mostly off our clothing), protective gear, and a paintball gun. We played a bunch of rounds over the course of a few hours. It's a good thing it was a cool day - paintball is a lot of cardio.
There were 8 of us, so we divided up into two teams of four, identified by our chestguards (there were camouflage ones and plain black ones). I joined Mark, Yuri, and Ellen on the "camo" team. We started out with some team elimination rounds, which our team seemed to do well at. We moved to a bigger field and played a few rounds of Capture the Flag, with a single flag in the middle. Yuri was successful in retrieving the flag twice.
After a couple breaks, we played several rounds of Zombies vs. Humans, in which three players started out as "zombies" which could only be killed with a headshot. If they shot a human, the human would return to the zombie base and join the zombie team. The game ends when one race is eliminated. I did much worse at this game than the previous two.
We tried some more Capture the Flag, and Allen just started sprinting for the flag in the middle. Since we're all newbies at paintball (and terrible shots to boot), none of us managed to stop him, and the rounds ended rather quickly. We convinced the guy refereeing to find a second object to serve as a flag and to modify the game such that there would be two flags, and to score, each team would have to retrieve the flag located in the opposing team's base. Add in respawns, and we had a lengthy and well-fought battle - both sides had lots of trouble approaching the enemy's base. Eventually, I got one opponent from the flank, another head-on, and caught Weihan at the base with his gun pointing up enough that the hopper wasn't loading paintballs into the barrel when he pulled the trigger. As the three returned to their respawn point, I grabbed their flag and sprinted at top speed back to my base, ending the round.
Once we were all worn out (and had shot just about all of our paintballs), we went to Cha Cha Sushi for dinner. They are highly rated on Yelp, and rightly so. All the rolls were excellent, and the green tea ice cream is over-the-top.
We returned to downtown Palo Alto, and I dropped by the imo office, where Erdal and Patrick were still around. I chatted with them for a bit about permissions systems and API designs and dealing with the Android Market and such, then drove back to Berkeley.
The "paint" inside the paintballs is completely washable. I'm doing laundry now, and my hoodie is back to its normal shade of black.
I am going to ache tomorrow. No welts, but a few red spots (the hits on my fingers were the worst) and some tired legs from running. But a good kind of tired, and one that will remind me that I had fun trying something new.