over the hills and thru the woods

this weekend was nothing if not adventurous. the hedgefund sales desk organized a paintballing outing on saturday, so a bunch of us and a bunch of clients bussed all the way out to tuen mun to shoot little pellets at each other. truthfully, it was a bit of a letdown. i mean, you get shot once and you're out, so it's not like lasertag when you can run around and shoot rambo style...instead, it's a lot of waiting in brush, waiting behind cars, and sniping. i'm not good at waiting, so usually, you'd see me charging someone and getting shot in the process. i guess my ideal of paintballing was established by that scene in ten things i hate about you (we miss you mr ledger). you know, when they're dumping buckets of paint on each other? anyways, my key moments were 1) when i unloaded a whole magazine into jon's back b/c i thought he was the bad guy and 2 ) when i shot a guy in the head as he made his suicide run at me, but of course, he had momentum on his side, so he emptied his magazine into me anyways. you know those scenes in movies when ppl get shot multiple times and their bodies flail in the air? yeah, that was me. those pellets bruise! (do i watch too much tv? hey, at least it kept me off the streets).

saturday night, hubert made his signature homemade lasagna, so of course, jon and i went over to eat. turns out we weren't the only guests...turns out, every other guest was there to carboload for an action asia race sunday morning. um...oink oink? yeah, so i get talked into doing this race...the only thing they tell me is that it's a 12km run/hike, so i'm thinking it's mostly paved, probably a mountain somewhere in the middle of it. turns out they call it an adventure race for a reason. the trail is maybe 1-2km of flat running, before you turn offroad, run another 1 km or so in a stream (like literally, jumping from rock to rock, sloshing thru the muddied waters, hoping to god that your ankles hold up), and then you climb up a construction site off the side of the highway up this hill. once you top the hill (which was pretty steep and unpaved), you're running thru brush, ducking the branches. coming downhill was pretty fun, the path swerves quite a bit and the trail is pretty steep, but there are lots of trees, so you can swing from tree to tree. my strategy was to run run run run smack into a tree run run run rinse repeat. and then it's another river. i actually turned the wrong way down this river b/c of some stupid fake red ribbon tied around a tree (red ribbons marked the trail). i think i lost maybe 10 mins here? yeah, that's why my time sucked. the second river was much more slippery. i was falling all over the place...one time i fell straight onto a branch...as in, it went up my nose. that hurt. i'm surprised my nose didn't start gushing right then. other times i'd get caught up in vines while trying to go thru the bushes...those suckers are tough mfs. some ppl got scratched up pretty good by the thorns, but my tights served me well (also i may not have been traveling as fast as them). to come out of the river, you have to run along a concrete drainage area (like the race scene in grease) before flipping over a chest height guardrail. i think that was my favorite part. especially since it meant flat running for the rest of the race. i'm pretty slow on the scrambling parts, so i wasn't tired much at all by the end...i think i passed 5 ppl in the last kilometer, racing a guy into the finish. final time: 2:17. awright, completion!

i skipped disc b/c i had a massive headache (probably lack of sleep+dehydration), so i missed playing pickup with shuangy. i did catch her at dinner afterwards tho, and i got to meet her boy! he's mit 2005, course 18, random so they complement each other well. he's very nice and funny, but he has some strange theory about damp kids in horror movies...riiight james. after dinner, we played a bit of rockband, talked about how fast smite is, and then i handed her some clothes+a map and saw her on her merry way. until jazzfest, shuangy!