Slagen Bandits Hunting Trophies in Greece

http://slagenbandits.net/site/

Last year we kicked off the season with a great trip to Portugal after months and months of snow and cold. This year the winter in southern Norway wasn’t so hard but in April we were still very far from being able to play paintball outdoors. We decided early that we wanted to do something similar to last year. We wanted a paintball trip to somewhere warm, to get rid of most of the off-season rust and at the same time meet new friends in exciting new places.

Together with our trusted traveling companions Mats and Ami from Hybrid Foto we decided to pay a visit to Greece and the newly formed Med League.

We flew down to Thessaloniki on Wednesday with six players, and we were picked up by our host Kostantinos from Anthrax paintball at the airport. Anthrax had just made our new jerseys this year, in a brilliant new color. The color change was because of  the coming ban on yellow in all equipment. (Yellow will be reserved as a paint color as of 2013 in the Millenium Series. ) We are very happy with how the jerseys turned out. Thank you Kosta!

Late Wednesday evening we dined with our Greek hosts at a nice and cozy restaurant. Here we got to taste all the different Greek food you could imagine and we enjoyed the culinary experience. We rolled back to the hotel well after midnight.

We spent most of Thursday exploring our surroundings from our hotel at the beach, and watched the PSP Phoenix webcast, before we dined at Kostas place together with a lot of other great paintball players.

During the evening we learned a new expression – “Greek time” it’s for instance when they say something takes 10 minutes, expect about an hour. J The Greek are the most relaxed and calm people we’ve ever met. Even when the Barbecue went up in large flames, they did not stress, just strolled into the kitchen to steady pour some water into a cup and walk out to the BBQ inferno without making so much as a sudden movement. I sounds crazy, and it took us the whole weekend to get used to it, but when we did – it was actually kind of great J No stress, things will work itself out some way JWe have a lot to learn.

Friday was practice day at the field, the first time with paint since October for many of us. Needless to say we felt a little bit rusty, but at the end of the day things started to come together. Later that night we joined all the other players at the players-party in Thessaloniki at a nightclub called Dogs Club.

Saturday started out with nice sunny weather and the three man tournament in xball, race to 2 format. We had divided our team into Slagen Bandits old and Slagen Bandits young. The action was mostly fast and furious, and the games went by quickly. Slagen Bandits old was undefeated until the semifinals against Dogs D Amor. Slagen Bandits young lost a couple of points, but won all their matches except one, and also made the semifinals against Brussels Crossfire. Crossfire played well and SB young were knocked out of the run for 1^st place. That meant that we played ourselves for third and fourth with the young team coming out on top. A very strong Crossfire won the event.

After the dust settled there was spit roasted lamb for everyone at the site! Later in the afternoon there was a mini Nations Cup in 5 man xball, race to 3. We represented Norway and the other national teams were Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria.

We beat Bulgaria in a close first match but did not drop a point against Cyprus in the finals and took our first win for the season.

Sunday was even warmer than on Saturday and the action was even hotter. On the very first point our snake player pulled his hamstring and we had to play with five players for the rest of the event. We won our two first prelims games, then lost against Dogs D Amor again. Two wins were enough to make it to the quarter finals but by this point the heat was taking its toll on our bodies, and we were getting a little bit tired after three day of paintball in the heat. That coupled with a back injury meant we had to switch some players around for the quarters against SKG Titans. It did not work all that well and we lost. Crossfire ended up winning this event also.

After hitting the showers some very tired Bandits gathered at Kostas place for some pizza before packing our stuff and heading for home.

We want to thank Kostantinos, Nil and all our other Greek friends who helped us in so many ways and made this a memorable trip!

And of course a big thanx to our sponsors: Planet Eclipse, Hybrid Foto, Game-On, Anthrax, Globe Souldiers, Goldhammer, Snøservice, Slagen Paintball, KM straps, Dark Sportz

Thanks to http://hybrid-foto.com/ for the pics!!