A couple of weeks ago I went paintballing for the third time in my life. The last time I went paintballing was four years ago in Spain with my friend Mitch and a group of Spanish friends. This time it was with a bunch of other English teachers in Korea.
In Spain we played on a course with wooden built structures, here we played in the woods with big rectangular tombstone-like boards for cover. It was on a hill, a slant so half of your body was constantly pulled downward, while you played and ran across it horizontally.
The paintball area was part of a campground/summer park grounds. The directions were difficult to find and when I arrived, I stopped my car at the entrance to double-check if I was in the right place. I didn’t think I was because it was supposed to be called “Generals land” but it wasn’t written anywhere on the sign. I decided to go in anyway. I saw a cafe and figured I could ask about it there, but as I was getting out of my car I saw two friends who had already asked and confirmed that it was the place.
Before playing the guide explained the rules. The only problem was he spoke very little English. He did try though! He even gave us a sheet with rules translated from Korean into English, but almost all of them were confusing and didn’t make sense, like “if you’re in the fire zone don’t”, or “clock-wise is okay.” We needed multiple things clarified and this was done by hand to full-body gestures and simple words. Eventually, we figured out that only head-shots counted as “out” and nowhere else on the body mattered. We also weren’t 100% sure what game types we were going to play. One of the games ended up being capture the flag, but neither teams knew this.
Paintballing is a lot of fun, it’s exhilarating; deciding to run to a new cover took a lot of mental motivation, it feels like minutes pass by before you make it and when you do it’s extremely difficult to remove yourself from the shelter to fire on the opposing team. Thankfully the guns aren’t too accurate or I would have been hit a lot more. For a couple of welts and some fun, it cost us 30,000₩ each ($25.48).
