A party, a pub-crawl and paintball...

Its one thing to to be with your mates/friends/people generally in your age range and have the lot of you acting like you were 10 years younger. Actually I would go so far as to say there is nothing more rewarding and satisfying to relive tension and have a good time.

But when you are in your mid to late twenties (still not that old I know...) and you are in a group where the average age is 17-18, you will still find it hard going quite a bit.

Which is the position I found myself on Friday last week at my AIESEC buddy's party. Oh, dont get me wrong, i mixed it up like mad and had a good conversation with one girl in particular. (it helped that she was drop-dead gorgeous... even if she wont return my calls now...:) But when they started doing body shots with whipped cream and tequila shots... i felt so out of place. I was invited to 'body-shot' off a nice looking 19 year old but gracefully declined with a smile on my face. Ah Well... Twas a good coming-of-age party and Yifan the birthday girl in question had a smashing time... (key word here is 'Smashing(ed)

Mialy and I were together and we met up with James Rowland one of the AIESECers who was on a pub crawl with a bunch of his non-AIESEC friends. They were half-way through when we met up with them so we crawled through 5 or 6 pubs before heading home. It helped that James and his friends were Beer Conneissours (is that how it is spelled?) and so were able to give us the history, reputation and pedigree of the beer on sale. Pretty frigging amazing! Who would have guesses that the ordinary looking vintage ale I had had inspired a great work of art!!!

Ended up dancing at the viaduct, a really snazzy complex on the waterfront with quite a few bars and clubs there. Got dancing with this seemingly young Asian woman but when i went out for air and got a blast of cold icy wind to clear my head, she looked all her 40 years (at least!) heheheheheheheheh

But the highlight of the whole weekend was the Action Paint ball.




It is going to be a long hard road to get rid of war and violence in this world of ours. As if it is not enough that there are such divisive factors as religion, ethnicity and pure power plays, some will also instigate it for profit but a whole lot of people will just want to go to war for the sheer adrenaline rush!!!

We were dressed in long overalls and had protective helmets to protect our eyes from the water-based paint balls which travel about 250 feet a second! According to the staff there, one of those balls hits your eyes and your eye-balls will definitely be on the losing side. Say bye-bye eye-ball!

There were 18 people in total in our group and we split up into 2 groups along the lines of ICX and OGX. We got suited up in the overalls and protective helmets, got the safety run through by our designated 'referee' who was going to take us through each of the 'games'.

A few minutes on the target range and we were ready!The guns are specially constructed with gas cylinders attached which turns the paint-balls (which are about half the size of a ping-pong ball) into such deadly projectiles.

We played five different 'games' which all had to do with variations of either capturing a main flag and planting it in the opposing team's base or planting your own flag on a hill and defending for a certain time period.

Pic below is me striding confidently to the OGX team base to wipe the flag in their faces after we had eliminated all of them...















In one or two of the games, we had recurring lives which meant when you got tagged (have a paintball explode on some part of your body leaving a large splotch), you had to scream "TAG" and rush to your base get cleaned up and rush back into the fray. In the particular game above, we had only one life each so when you got tagged, you went to your base and stayed there!

Needless to say, my team (ICX) won four out of the five games.

Did I mention how painful it was to have those paintballs explode on ANY part of your body? Some really nasty bruises were sustained and we could all see how one could lose an eye in the game! Quite a number of the girls vowed never to play again! (and I am sure some of the guys as well, albeit quietly!)

In the picture below, i am under heavy fire and have the popping of the air guns flying over my head! You have to experience the adrenaline rush to understand what I am on about!