It has been a while. For the past week and a half, I've been chilling in by second home - Mainz, Germany. Since C has a lot to do with both her job and her Master's program, I've had a lot of time to myself, time to realize that I'm really not a student anymore, at least at the moment. It's been time to look over my Lebenslauf (CV), for example, and bring it up to date. It's been time for me to consider doing my Master's here in Mainz, to look for summer employment before then, and to start teaching myself the programming language Python.
It's also just been a time to reflect. This is my first real vacation in a long time, as I mentioned in my last post. When I arrived here, it was New Years Eve. It seemed wonderfully fitting to spend my first night in Mainz watching the sky burst into flame with fireworks. Two years ago, when I was living here, there were of course lots of fireworks as well - New Years is a holiday that without a doubt, is much more fun in Germany than in the states. I wrote a long entry two years ago about watching the fireworks rise in a curtain above Wiesbaden, the city on the other side of the Rhine from Mainz. Well, this year instead of being down at the river, we were on top of one of the highest hills in Mainz with about seven friends, some champagne, and some sparklers. Of course, some people are too impatient to wait for the actual time of midnight to send the fireworks into the air, so at around 11:58, 11:59 I wondered whether the time had already come and we had just missed it -- and then 0:00 hits and your eardrums stop working. The sky is filled with red, green, blue, white, and yellow and it goes on without even wavering for at least fifteen minutes. It's incredible to reflect to calmly even within that din. Starting the year off with a bang - or maybe, giving the last one a proper sendoff. Last year was one of the most emotionally intense ones I have ever experienced, and even though there was never really a doubt that I wouldn't, it was somehow incredibly satisfying and relieving to realize that I had actually made it through.
Since then, as I said, I've been keeping busy, but I've also been letting myself get a bit of rest. I'm not usually type who can take three hour naps and still go to bed around 10:00 and fall asleep easily, but that's happened more than once. Something tells me that on a deeper level, I've been pretty tired, in both body and brain. So, for my body, I've been letting myself sleep. And for my brain? Well, as my old friends know, when I am letting myself just relax, one of the things I love to do most is watch cooking shows and nature documentaries. So, at least one of those things is being watched each day as well. :)
I'm at a junction now of More Studies and Work, and it's good to just see both possibilities and not freak out, at least to try to. Just to think about one and then the other, realize that whichever I choose at the moment won't necessarily be what I do for ever and ever. I don't know if any of the things I'm applying for will work out, so I won't write about them here until I know whether or not they will.
But what about that Lasertag thing in the title of this post? Well, one of the best things recently has been what I sometimes call 'active relaxation', or 'active hanging out'. Basically, I think it's tricky these days to have a nice night out with friends where you are NOT either a) watching something or b) eating something. Options that are not those first two are sometimes hard to find, sometimes expensive, and sometimes hard to convince ourselves to take part in since they require at least a small amount of effort, sometimes more. For example, last week C and I went on a walk. Okay, that sounds boring. What I mean is, we walked from her apartment to the river, across the bridge where the trains go, and then followed near the train tracks until we were about three stops from Mainz - just a casual six mile walk for fun. Then, another night, we went to a bath house - okay, really not much effort involved in that, but still, it's different than sitting in a restaurant or a theater. And then last night? Well, last night was Lasertag.
:)
So, we went with four of C's friends to this new Lasertag place in one of the suburbs of Mainz. It was hard to find - small signs, not well lit, in the back of a parking lot - all looked very shady. Only one of us in the group of five had ever played such a game before, and that was a long time ago for her. So, we got there and learned that our first game was going to be a standard game - our team of five against another team of seven that had signed up for the same time slot.
It works like this. You get a vest with several lights attached to it - two large V's of light on your chest and back, two small ones on each of your shoulders, and one light on the top of your phaser. Our team had red lights, the other team green. If you get hit by someone else's laser, then your own phaser tells you "You've been hit!" and your lights go dark for about five seconds. During that time, you can't be hit and also can't hit anyone else. Then, the lights come back on and you're ready to go. If you are playing in teams, then for ever hit that we (the red team) made on the green team, we got 5 points. And for every time they hit us, we lost 3 points. They also keep track of individuals, so I could also see at the end of the game how many times I had hit each of the other players on the green team, and how often each one of them had hit me. So, at the end, you have two team scores but also an individual ranking (everyone's phaser has a number on it, so no names or anything, but everyone knows their own number).
The first game was nuts. Each game lasts twenty minutes and you go into this dark room - filled with smoke and large pieces of wood that are formed into walls for you to hide or duck behind, and loud music (some kind of movie soundtrack, Pirates or something similar) playing. Really sets the mood. On one side of the (quite, quite large) room, there was the green base - on the other, the red base. There, there's a big red light under which you have to hold your phaser to 'recharge' every so often (after you've been hit five times). For the first five minutes of the game, I don't think hardly any of us red folks even left our base. We were so shocked at how big the room was, how dark, how easy it was to get hit from behind as you were peering around another corner to try and shoot someone else, and for me, it seemed like the green folks were just everywhere! But eventually, we became more daring and tore out of our shelter and into the fray. I think I jumped and dashed and ducked far more often than was necessary, but suddenly the twenty minutes were up and we were sweaty and panting and trooped out of the dark room to see how we had done.
I should mention here the that the green team had just played another team before us, and we had never played before. So, both experience and numbers were in their favor (though one could argue that we had more targets to shoot at than they did). And so, we did lose, as we had thought from being inside the arena. 630-something to 450-something. The girl working at the counter told us that for a first game against a team that already knew the layout of the room that our score wasn't half bad.
And.... the individual player ranking? Though we lost by a considerable amount, I was the top scoring player above even all of the green team's players. I've never played at war before - even as a kid, my sister and I were more inclined to play gorillas or horses, or to build forts in the woods than to even play something like cops and robbers. But even so, even in my pacifist thoughts, to stand there afterwards and hear all the people on the green team muttering, "Who was number 8?" was just thrilling. :) It's the little things in life.
The second game was just our team and was every girl for herself - it was exhausting and hilarious. A malfunctioning phaser, a big collision involving a new friend and myself and lots of laughter afterwards, and plenty of cruel sneaking up on friends. It was a good night.
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