Thursday, December 5

Today we woke up early and had breakfast in the hotel before getting on the bus. We were all waiting on the bus but we couldn’t leave until everyone was on it and there were 3 people missing. They were the same Germans that had been late the last time. The counselors went up to one of the dude’s rooms and knocked and yelled and finally busted in with the master key, but he wasn’t there. Turns out he had slept in the other two’s room because they had been up late drinking and smoking. When the counselors opened up the room they were literally still sleeping and the counselors gave them less than a minute to put on warm clothes and get to the bus. Once they were on the bus the counselors made an announcement that those three would not be allowed on any other rotary trips. I guess they were really serious about making it clear that we had to respect the rules. When we got to the pier, we got on another boat. This one was super nice with tables and booth seats and everything. While we drove the 3 hours out to Parque Nacional Bernardo O’Higgins, Katie Ward and I taught some friends how to play the card game Mao. It passed the time super fast. Then we got off the boat and went on a hike around a lake that was formed by a glacier and up to the actual glacier.

We took a ton of pictures, and then hiked back to the boat. While on the hike, this guy went down to the water and picked out a piece of ice and we all took turns licking it and getting excited about the taste of authentic glacier ice. Then when we got back on the boat they served us juice (the tradition is to serve whiskey but we’re under age so juice) with glacier ice.

It was way colder than normal ice would have made it, and the glacier ice refused to melt for a really long time. It was really cool. Then the boat docked on another little island where we all got off to eat lunch. We ate cordero (sheep) which is a typical delicacy in the south. I was brave enough to try a piece even though I’m a vegetarian, and that is more than can be said about a lot of my friends. They were total chickens and didn’t even try the typical food of the south while they were in the south! After lunch we went outside and took some group pictures, and then rode the boat back to the main dock again.

We got back to the hotel and most people went to take naps, but a few of us went out souvenir shopping. I bought t-shirts for me and my parents at home, souvenirs for everybody in my family here, and postcards with pictures of all the places we’d gone. Then we went back to the hotel and went to dinner at the same restaurant we had gone to before. This was our last night, so the counselors had put together this super cute PowerPoint of picture from the trip and gave a great speech. I really liked this one line that they said—“if everyone in the world had the chance to be an exchange student, there would be no more wars because now that you all have real life personal connections in all these countries, you will never want to drop bombs on them for fear of killing your friends.” That is totally true. Meeting people from all these countries and seeing how similar they are and how amazing they are has really opened my eyes to the rest of the world. After dinner, we were all going to go to a nightclub (rotary approved) to dance, but the nightclub said we couldn’t come in because we were under aged, so we ended up going back to the same restaurant where we always eat, pushing the tables to the side, plugging my iPod into the speakers, and dancing there. It was super obvious who had gotten drunk in the hotel before coming to the restaurant, and a surprising number of people had. They walked around unsteadily and danced way too sexually and two people even made out even though the counselors were all standing right there watching. I had a lot of fun dancing and watching the drunken people make fools of themselves. A couple of Germans did this amazingly fun looking spinning dance called Disco Fox or something in German that sounds like that and then I begged them to teach me. It was a lot harder than they made it look but I had fun trying. Around 2 we had to leave, so we went back to the hotel and sat in the hallway talking for about two seconds until the counselors came up and screamed at us for being awake and made us go to our rooms immediately. They obviously knew a lot of us had been drinking and I’m sure they were pretty pissed, but they never actually punished anyone for it.