How to induce cognitive dissonance: read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, then go to a pig roast. Where the hosts are playing Guns N’ Roses.

That’s how I spent my winter vacation in Bali, and I wrote about it for this month’s issue of Perceptive Travel. You can read the whole thing here: Eating a Personal Pig.

I also liked Jim Johnson’s story about Morocco–specifically, about a guy visiting his octogenarian mother who’s volunteering for the Peace Corps in some Berber village. Ah, squat toilets. They somehow make me happy.

There’s also a far more charitable review of Chuck Thompson’s To Hellholes and Back than I would’ve written. I know he said all that stuff about Muslims just to enrage sensitive flowers like myself, but, dude, those pushy, money-grubby kids in India are not pushy and money-grubby because they’re Muslim. The fact that you nearly got ripped off doesn’t merit several pages of anti-Islam screed that just shows you’re kind of ignorant.

BUT I was interested to read about the Congo, so that chapter’s worthwhile. And of course I’m happy to read anything about how great Mexico is, even though people are freakishly afraid of it. (Man–I just read some random review of a hotel in Las Cruces, NM, that mentioned the guy had stopped there for the night instead of El Paso, because of the violence in Juarez. Uhhhh, what?!)