Don't Shoot the American

A little bit ago Niel, one of my students, and one of the class monitors, invited me to play what he described as CS, Counter Strike a shooter video game, in real life. After a series of questions I determined what he was talking about was some sort of laser tag. When I was a kid I loved playing laser tag at the place not far outside of DC. He arranged for it to be on a Saturday and invited a lot of his classmates. Most of the students who came I knew, but a few were their friends or girlfriends and not my students. The place where they rent the equipment was not that far from the front gate of the school. When we biked over there there was only one problem, no one was around. Niel said he had arranged the time with the people who ran the place but we were a little early. Finally the guy who ran the place showed up, he turned out to be a gym teacher from the school. The problem now was that we had so many people that we had to wait for another group to finish or we wouldn't have enough equipment.

We waited for almost two hours. I thought the whole thing would have been over at that point so I had go soon. Finally the other people finished so we got suited up. They had these camouflage suits and helmets with little sensors on them to tell if you shoot what you were aiming at. The whole thing then worked together over a network to see when people had been shot and by who. We biked over to a wooded area near the river to play. First of course we took about a hundred pictures, because what's the point of doing anything in China without a mountain of pictures. Finally we actually played a little. We divided into two teams and basically just chased each other through the underbrush. The funniest thing was that the laser guns couldn't really shoot through the bushed very well so you would be trying to shoot someone five feet from you and getting no result. I played in two games before ripping my jacket pretty good on a tree. I decided that since it was getting late anyways that was enough for me. I talked to Niel and offered to pay but he said that Ma Ming had already gotten the school to pay for it. It was a lot of fun in the end, despite the waiting, and I got my jacket fixed when I got back.