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.