New Experience: Paintball, finally!

For many years I always wanted to try paintball, but, for some reason or another, it hadn't happened yet. Last week I finally got my chance: a friend of mine was celebrating his kid's birthday at a paintball center, Operation Paintball, in the woods south of Seattle, and he invited me.

It was a lot of fun! The center provides a mask and the gun, and you pay for the boxes of paintballs (and, believe me, they go really fast). It is a great piece of advice to wear thick clothes: you immediately feel, and very clearly, when you're hit by a paintball. The center has three available fields: urban warfare, taking the hill, and the one for rookies with inflatables. We started by the rookie one, then progressed to taking the hill, in which you have to go up a slope to take over the top which is defended by some players entrenched there, and finally we went to the urban warfare field, in which various structures simulate houses and other urban structures that you have to fight for.

By the way, don't be fooled by the rookie field: all three fields very much get your blood pumping fast. It is actually a very intense exercise, to the point that your masks fog up. Even though it is just paintballs, running in the open field hearing the sound of paintballs being fired puts a lot of adrenalin in your veins. It took a long time for me to finally experience paintball, but now that I did it I loved it! I'm looking forward to do it again.






Location: Graham, WA, USA

Popular posts from this blog

Hiking the Granite Creek Trail to the Granite Lakes

Image
At this time of the year, the hiking trails in Washington are becoming snow free, marking the start of the hiking season. To get started, I took a pretty convenient trail, not far from where I live: the Granite Creek trail. The trail starts pretty close to the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River, and as the name implies it follows the Granite Creek until it reaches the Granite Lakes up high. I just returned from the trail, and it was a great way to begin hiking this year. The trail was in great shape, wide and well kept. Nevertheless, it was a very wet hike: there was a drizzle all the way up, plus all the snow melt meant that there were numerous little creeks crossing the trail. In fact, there were two larger creeks on the path that required some fording, but not as bad as I had to do in other hikes. There was also a small bridge when the trail crosses over the Granite Creek, and you can see how much water is coming down the mountain. The trail ends at the Upper Granite Lake, which ha...
Read more

Not for the afraid of heights: Skyscraper Glass Cubes

Image
A number of major cities around the world have created a similar tourist attraction, that has proven to be quite popular: a glass cube, made of reinforced glass, that sticks out of the side of a major skyscraper. I'm spending some time in São Paulo, which has its own version of this attraction, and I had the opportunity to try it out. In a major skyscraper close to the city center there is Sampa Sky : on the 42nd floor, four glass cubes stick out of the sides of the building giving an incredible view of the massive city of São Paulo (the eighth largest in the world, with 21 million people in the metro area - and also where I was born). I'm not going to lie: I had an intense feeling of vertigo when I stepped in the first cube. It requires some courage to go all the way forward and touch the front glass. After some time you overcome your fear, that is, until you look down and back at the building and you have the impression that you are not on the side that you should be in a sk...
Read more

New Music Genre: Hardcore Punk with Refused

Image
A week ago I got a chance to watch a concert of a music genre I hadn't heard before: Hardcore Punk. Most people have heard about Punk all the way from the 70's, with Sex Pistols and the Ramones. From that original genre later came Hardcore Punk: more independent bands, outside of the commercial mainstream, with politically confrontational lyrics and a really, really loud sound. One good example of that sound is  Refused , a Swedish hardcore punk band formed in 1991 that has been touring the world. Lucky for me, they were giving a concert at The Showbox  in downtown Seattle, and I managed to get a ticket. I was really curious about them, and they did not disappoint! To say that you go watch a hardcore punk concert would be incorrect: it's more like that you are attacked by ear blasting sound with incredibly intense lights and other effects, such as lots and lots of smoke and quick changes in the music tempo, to keep you on your toes all the time. I've been to Heavy Metal...
Read more