Chapter 11

The following night a group of eight kids from Notre Dame invaded my hostel. Despite the fact that I came down to Argentina as an exchange student myself, I despised every exchange student I met.

While I was in Mendoza a group of kids from Duke took over the ping pong table to play beer pong. After a month of living in hostels, I learned that the only way to prove your country's superiority to another's is by holding your own in a game of table tennis. That being said these stupid Yanks were making a mockery of my homeland by using the sacred table for a bullshit drinking game. Everyone else in the hostel just glared at them with a look of death.

This group from Notre Dame was far worse than the Duke posse as they spent the night talking about drinking beer, shotgunning beer, doing beer bongs, talking about beer, drinking liquor and drinking beer. The following morning they stumbled into the family room and spent three hours analyzing what they had drank the night before, how hungover they were and trying to pinpoint the very moment they officially blacked out the night before.

Please don't ask me to justify my own actions of watching TV or bring up the Leonardo DiCaprio "Beach" theory because it will make my head explode.

Additionally my first meal in Chile consisted of a hamburger that contained living bugs on it and this was at the place the hostel recommended.

Chile wasn't all bad though as I went on a 40-kilometer bike ride by myself and I saw some of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life. I made it to a secret waterfall where I sat alone, with no other tourists and no kids from Notre Dame for an hour in front of a gorgeous crystal clear waterfall contemplating how good life is. I thought about how fortunate I was to be on this trip and have health, happiness as well as the health and happiness of my friends and family. I then moved to a nice grassy valley, where all I could hear was the river gently flowing and the wind rustle between the trees. There in the middle of nowhere I thought about all the nice things I thought about in front of the waterfall in addition to how fortunate the world is that we can all watch LeBron James dominate the NBA for at least another 10-15 years.

I sat there for 30 minutes trying to capture the absolute tranquility in my day journal. Then I began to bike the 20 kilometers back home. The ride home wasn't as perfect as the ride to the waterfall. Rain began to pour and I was dead tired with no money or food on me. I started peddling in the direction of home and after a couple of kilometers I got lazy and put my thumb out with the intention to hitchhike back to town. I was told it was quite safe to hitchhike everywhere in Argentina and I assumed Chile would be no different. I also knew that if things got ugly and I was tortured, killed and left in a shallow grave in a country I hate, perhaps one day somebody would find my journal, be able to translate it and eventually turn it into a lame movie that was narrated by Katt Williams. Then I remembered that I didn't have my name or Katt Williams name in my journal. So I took cover in a bus stop (I didn't have enough money for the bus, nor was there room on the small bus for my bike) and wrote in the front cover of my journal “Si buscas este diario por favor escriba Justin Adler a justinadler1@gmail.com,” then I wrote in English that I wanted Katt Williams to narrate my life story should the situation present itself.

Chapter 7

I hung out for several days in Mendoza just because I had a solid group of friends in the hostel and Mendoza was the perfect town. If you enjoy perfect weather and streets perfectly lined by sycamores with running canals lining their perimeter, you would probably enjoy Mendoza.

We were all broke travelers so we hung out a lot in the hostel and watched whatever was on the TV. One night we watched “The Beach” because there is nothing better to do while traveling than watch a movie about somebody else traveling. As I sat there jotting down my notes and writing silly ironic lines like the sentence before this one, Leonardo DiCaprio beat me at my own game as he sat in a Thai hostel and said, “We all travel thousands of miles just to watch TV and check in to somewhere with all the comforts of home, and you gotta ask yourself, what is the point of that?”

And at that point I lost my mind a little bit, so I went to bed halfway through the movie. And then I realized that I always went to bed halfway through movies when I lived in the United States. And then I realized that Leonardo DeCaprio won again. And then I got angry. And then I fell asleep.

The next day Cara and I voyaged to some thermal baths that were a 40-minute bus ride outside of town. It was almost as if God knew I needed a reason to relax from an already relaxing vacation so he made the bus ride extremely annoying and stressful. Every kid from the greater Mendoza region seemed to hop on the bus and many of them sang and danced around the aisle. At one point a little boy decided to sneeze directly into my ear, filling my entire ear canal with snot. This was a little frustrating.

Then his older brother wanted to show off his English skills and vast knowledge of the United States, which involved him repeating three cities over and over again. He asked a few questions. When I told him I was from Arizona, he looked at his younger brother and confidently said Arizona is just like Feeladelphia.

Finally we made it to the thermal baths. Beautiful warm pools in the middle of a scenic canyon. The only tough part was not staring at the 16-year-olds wearing next to nothing because I didn't want God to give me diarrhea again.

I just sat there and stared at the canyon, the beautiful blue sky and thought about life. I didn't come up with much, but I settled upon a tattoo. I had been thinking about getting a tattoo a month before I left for Argentina. However I could never settle on what I wanted. While swimming in the hot baths, I finally figured it out. I used to have a mole on the palm of my left hand that has faded over the years. I decided I should get it redone because it would be the best tattoo ever. It would symbolize the beauty in the world's asymmetry and it would be very individualistic because I don’t know many people who have had moles redone. Then I realized that that could very well be the gayest thing I ever considered and I started doing Cara's crossword puzzle to try to bring my mind back to normal.

That night I sat in my chair and wrote as Cara watched TV next to me. I thought about how awesomely psychotic it would be if I just kept stealing the life story of whoever I met in my last spot and passed it off as my own when I kept traveling. Then “House” came on and they diagnosed a patient who has mirror disease, in which he steals other peoples illnesses. Fuck. This was the second night in a row the TV had stolen my ideas.