Playing like Chinese hillbillys

There are many things that we thought we might get the chance to do in China. Eat noodles. See the Great Wall. Learn to play Mah Jong.

 One thing we hadn’t planned on doing: shooting guns.

Thats Cam with a shotgun.

This weekend, we decided to get out and explore at least one of the many resort activities that Jinshitan is famous for. Cameron had a tourist guide in his apartment when he moved in, so we were flipping idly through it and came across the shooting range. This place had it all. Laser tag and paintball. Pistols. Rifles. Shotguns. Target shooting, clay pigeon range, heck it looked like they would even let you chase farm animals around the woods with guns for the right price. We were very intrigued.

On Saturday afternoon we tried to call the range to find out if they were open. Someone answered the phone, but our lack of a firm grasp on the mandarin language made conversation difficult. We weren’t able to get any solid information about the range being open to tourists, but we deduced that there was someone there answering phones so the probability of the range being open was looking pretty good.

With the help of some of Kristen’s students who were passing by, we managed to tell a taxi driver where we wanted to go, and set off into the back hills of Jinshitan. Jinshitan is spread out on a peninsula that forks into two smaller peninsulas. The school is on the one furthest from Dalian, the range is on the one that is closer. We got a chance to see a wide swath of Jinshitan on our way, which was really neat, since we are rarely in a vehicle that leaves the main road. We headed up in to the hills, past gated communities of vacation homes, construction workers manhandling huge culverts into ditches by hand, dogs on the side of the road, forests of bare trees lined up in row after man planted row, Tang dynasty hotsprings (?) and a field full of concrete dinosaurs, before arriving at the range.

The range was typically Chinese, in that it couldn’t decide quite what it was. There was a windmill (Dutch) built around one of the buildings, a totempole (North Pacific Aboriginal) with Mayan figures (Central American) on it, and a pagoda style roof on another building. No one building was clearly the office, so we just wandered around for a few minutes until a lady showed up followed by three men with guns. Yep, we were in the right place!

Kristen Rieu? Annie Oakley? You be the judge.

Within minutes we were ready to shoot. The men set up a pistol first and it was only after we pointed out that we wanted hearing protection that they found ear protectors for us. Paul shot first (his first time shooting a gun!) and he was pretty shaky with adrenaline. His first target wasn’t great (although 9 of 10 hit the target), but by the second time up, he was getting complimented on his shooting by the range attendants! Cam and Ryan shot next, and Kristen (after a few minutes of thinking through whether she really wanted to do this) got a few pointers from the “pistol-master” before going on to show that she could easily keep up with the boys when it came to accurately shooting guns.

Say hello to Paul's little friend...

The rifle came, and suffice it to say that Paul is a really good shot and Ryan should have brought his glasses!

The one on the left is Paul's...

Although shooting small calibre pistols and rifles was fun, it was time to take it up a notch. Paul and Cameron took turns firing a shotgun at clay pigeons, with Cameron taking the honours. Eventually we had spent our allotted budget of 150 yuan each (about $25) and we wandered around the rest of the property, taking a look at the paintball and laser tag field and watching a group of jacked up Chinese people run around in cammo shooting each other with what looked like space guns. Definitely something we will be trying out soon!

Might have to try that again soon!