I was in the shit

I am recovering from a hard afternoon yesterday spent paintballing. It was my first time and, besides the physical discomfort and sweating, it was a lot of fun. A group of about 16 of us went to a place called Paintball Jungle just west of Sloterdijk station. We got there around 1 and, after suiting up in full-body camouflage suits and learning the rules and how to use the guns, we went for our first game, a simple capture the flag game. At this point, we were playing girls against guys, and we lost horribly twice to the guys, so we mixed up the teams after that. I got hit for the first time only about 5 seconds into the first game; I was poorly prepared and not protected at all. I got hit square in my left thigh, and yes, it does fucking hurt. I have a nice red and blue welt on my leg now, but others fared much worse. One girl got hit hard in her lower back and another was hit right on her tailbone. A guy was very lucky to be hit high on his inner thigh and not a bit more in the center.

The place had about 8 fields and we played most of them before I left with a group that wanted to leave earlier. Besides changing fields, the games also changed, like one team would defend a building while the other tried to grab the flag from near the building, or you'd capture the flag not from the other side of the field but from the center. I usually stayed in a more defensive position and tried to hit people on the other team, though I was never certain if I ever hit anyone. I would have tried to move around more, but I was very hot in the suit and face mask we wore, so I was quickly getting run down. It sucked that whenever we were in a field, we couldn't take off our mask, even if the game was over, and we'd usually play a game twice with the teams switching sides, so I'd be dying for some fresh air but I had to wait til we left the field. Fortunately we went back to the central starting area often so we could get drinks or food. I don't have too many battle wounds to show off tomorrow, but I guess I shouldn't worry about that.