When I heard that my college was organizing a Sports Day-like event with paintball as one of the activities in it for a very more-than-reasonable overall price of RM18 I immediately knew I had to go, since playing paintball is on my list of Things-To-Do-Before-I-Die.
Organized by Propassion Communications, Taylor’s University College hosted Taylor’s Mass Colympics on the 18th of April 2009 at the Xtion Paintball Park, Bukit Jalil. Tertiary students from all over came on that day for fun and games as well as to meet Allan Wu, the host for Amazing Race Asia. Highlight games included paintball, futsal, rock climbing as well as our very own mini Amazing Race. For RM18, it was a once in a lifetime chance of enjoying a healthy sporty day out with your friends, as well as meeting new ones.
I initially arranged to have a paintball team with my university friends, but after my high school friends got the wind of the event, all were clamouring to come. It turns out that 9 of them would be able to make it so including me, we formed two paintball teams. A team of the guys (Alpha) and a team of us girls (QueenB). My uni friends formed two teams as well.
I officially bought the tickets about a week before the event, and I had a great week as I was happily looking forward to the weekend. The anticipation is always greater and more wonderful than the thing itself, don’t you think so?
We made it to the stadium about one hour late and missed the briefing. We had to ask my uni friends to explain the rules. And suddenly, they announced the first teams to play and so it starts! My friends and I sat on the burning metal seat contraptions under the hot sun and watched the first teams play in order to get some strategy based on how other people played.
The objective was to shoot down your team’s glass bottle before grabbing two flags from different sides of the field and then running to home base. The team that scores the highest, counting along individual’s mistakes such as removing your mask before you’re allowed to, wins.
It was a coincidence that they put my team against the guys’ Alpha team! Anyway, once we found out that we were fighting each other, the guys got so excited and maybe a slightly tad overconfident. We girls didn’t say much but were determined to try our best and hopefully beat the guys, so we quietly watched other teams play and made our strategies.
It was all over in less than 5 minutes. And QueenB had won the first round! The boys were dejected and understandably embarrassed to have been beaten by the girls. We girls were ecstatic and high, now more confident and self-assured after having beaten the boys. I did not really play a big part in the winning of the game seeing as I did not shoot the bottle or any of the opposing team members, and neither did I capture any of the flags. In fact, I wasn’t aware that the bottle was shot and was busy trying to hide as much of myself as possible, while trying to shoot at the opposition. It was a while when I only realized that Joey had captured the second flag and was running to home base, so I followed.
Ah good team mates.
Overall, team QueenB won 3 rounds and made it into quarter finals but unfortunately due to tiredness and the long wait we lost in that round. The funny thing was that in the second last round we auto-made it into the next round because our opposing team had gone home. Yes, the wait in between rounds was that long.
On that day I also tried the rock climbing (which was not the first time) but unfortunately did not make it to the top! My whole body was sore for days after especially my arms – I blame it on this rock climbing thing, not the paintball game.
I’m very glad that we went for this event as playing private paintball is not cheap (It can reach up to a couple of hundred per person per game) and I also had a chance to sweat and tan myself, getting rid of the sickly paleness obtained through staying indoors studying (or in my case, facebook-ing heh).
Oh wait one more last thing. *crosses out Playing Paintball on list*
The original entry with more pictures at http://samanthacje.com/2009/04/taylors-mass-colympics-09.html
Originally published in the Malaysian Mensa magazine Triple M July - August 2009 Issue, pages 8 and 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave your email so that I can get back to you.