How to win the Bullshit Bingo
Hola. Two days ago I uploaded this quite nice picture showing myself in quite nice gear. Like I said before, this was taken at the "Beerzone" event. Every year about 1,000 people meet near Sokolov, Czech Republic to play airsoft. And less than 20 people are just there to look good in gear. They are called The Gearzone. This year it was my honor to accompany this little group. I've never met them before, so I was quite excited. How will they be like? How will they react? And what's more, how good do they really look? We arrived on Thursday, August 28th. We pitched up the tent in the middle of the campground. First night, first outrage. Some of the denser "sportsmen" shouted the Hitler salute all over the entire area. Some started to sing loudly about their favorite soccer club. The excessive drinking began on the very first day, one even came into our tent and asked for weed... As you can see, my first experiences were great. After waking up the next morning, we quickly decided to change places and brought the tents near to the edge of the campground. Wise decision, on Friday night we slept like a rock. One of the Gearzone members promised to prepare a so-called Bullshit Bingo. I don't think I have to explain how Bingo is played, huh? If you don't know: Let me Google that for you. But instead of finding the right numbers on the gridded card we wanted to find interesting people. Who will be the first of us to see an airsoft player walking around with more than one high-cap? And when will we hear the first one telling proudly about his possible career in the German Bundeswehr? "Yes, of course, they accepted my application and I would have become a sniper, but I refused the offer." And who will be the first to see one who wears his plate carrier the wrong way round? I guess this game would have been really funny... If we had played it. I am still not sure why we didn't, I suppose that our organizer just forgot to print the cards. However, we had fun watching the players anyway. Saturday, the big day had come. We had to wake up early to prepare everything. The Gearzone members unpacked their guns and the gear. For people who don't have the money to buy such things this must have been like heaven. Crye pants and shirts as far as the eye can see, thousands of dollars of original stuff and more than just one Systema PTW. It was marvelous. In the end we were a quite colorful group, some displayed members of the Navy Seals, others wore Ranger, MarSoc or German Bundeswehr stuff.
This is us. The Gearzone. Nice-looking and wonderful. Thanks to a very nice young man (Really, thanks a lot!) I could dress up in AOR2, which is basically one of my favorite camouflage patterns. I also had a Crye Precision JPC in Multicam, a hydration backpack in AOR1 and an Ops Core Fast Ballistic. Some more little things to get a well-rounded result. All in all, quite nice stuff and very nice-looking. I don't really wanna talk about all the blah blah (organisation of the game, implementation of the game, result of the game...). I just don't wanna talk about the game. Believe me, it wasn't the most interesting part of the weekend. I can only reveal that our team, called the "Beer thieves", was victorious in the end. My favorite moments really were the "Let's just watch this" moments. I mean, if you have gear you can sit down in the middle of the game. It doesn't matter if you're playing or chilling around, you look great anyway. By the way, it wasn't me who realized this, I just adopted this point of view. Because it's true. Sure, people can complain "This isn't the sense of the game!" or people can ask "So why are you participating then?". This won't bother a geardo. While being in-game someone asked us "What are you doing?". A Gearzone member answered "We just sit here. Go on playing, don't worry about us.". He obviously was baffled how anyone could undermine his authority (or the authority he loved to have). "But we need people to sentinel the flag we captured.", he said again. I was unable to stifle a laugh when my mate replied calmly "Oh, I think you guys can make it alone.". The face of the player was priceless. After listening to this short but interesting discussion we watched dozens of players walking, fighting and hiding near us. If we had played Bullshit Bingo, we would have had a winner after only an hour. Even better was watching the "final battle". Hundreds of players running towards each other, without any places to hide, without a strategy, without sense. I wasn't sure if this was more sad than funny, but yes, it definitely was funny. I couldn't stop taking photos. We saw people having the peace sign on their Flecktarn field blouse. We saw people running around with a sniper scope mounted on their MP5. We saw people playing "Call of Duty"-like with their pistol in one hand and a knife in the other hand. But the knife wasn't a knife, it was a pink... um, well... toy. I will stop reporting here. As you can see, we found loads of people which perfectly would have fitted into our Bullshit Bingo. In retrospect, it is quite sad that we didn't play Bingo. We would have had even more fun watching. To sum up: The "Beerzone" was the first big event for me. It wasn't that great considering the people walking around and showing coarse manners on the campground. Nevertheless, I looked good. (Thanks again to my savior!) Maybe next year I'll participate again. I don't really expect to have fun playing. But I hope that I'll be able to bring my own wonderful gear then. Saludos, Lola.
