People have long since ranted that movies and video games desensitize us to violence, and I would have to agree. Not in any misguided censorship-advocacy kind of way, that's absurd. For me it's more that I feel movies have given us an unrealistic perception of how resilient the human body is, and they have abandoned any pretense of accurately portraying just how fragile and pitiful most of us humans really are. Protagonists regularly take on multiple gunshot wounds or punches, when just one of either of these two things would be enough to take most of us down and keep us down. But along with everyone else, I find myself completely on board with this twisted new scale of human fortitude, yelling things at the screen like, "What is wrong with her, why isn't she getting back up? Wasn't she merely shot in the shoulder?"

Yes, I think these things, even though I know damn well that I will sometimes refuse to push onward with typing if I feel so much as a headache coming on.

By the way, spy thrillers about international espionage are hands down my favorite genre of film, and 007 movies have inspired more than one of my travel destinations. However, anyone who's ever done any traveling with a tour group of any size knows that a gang of super agents is not what you look like. You can barely get through the first floor of a museum before someone in your group has twisted their ankle or claims to have food poisoning from a bad cup of coffee. I would love to see at least one James Bond film where he can't get it together and misses his flight, all because he can't seem to comprehend that departure time is different from boarding time.

When I snapped the above photo, I was traveling with a sizable group, and before entering the country, we were all given a list of things best to avoid while in Morocco. Just below drinking the tap water, was the warning to avoid eating any snails being sold by street vendors. What an oddly specific admonishment, I remember thinking, and yet, as you can see from the photo above, here we are. The man is looming over his massive bowl of snails, listening to someone in our group ask her absurd questions.

"We were told to avoid eating snails that were unsafe, are yours of that variety?"

I could have sworn I saw him roll his eyes, but he quickly assured her they were not.

"My snails are the safest!" he told her, and that was apparently all she needed to hear. She ordered and ate a huge bucket of his street snails. Then, in an unrelated story -- that this woman assures us was pure coincidence -- she was horribly sick to her stomach all night and out of commission the entire next day. We may never know why.

Personally, I suspect spy craft and dastardly espionage were likely at play.

I want to mention that throughout our trip, I had already found this snail-ordering woman to be irritating and obnoxious. She had taken great pains to belabor the point that she was a foodie, and she would not shut up about what a super-duper adventurous eater she was. It was like her whole schtick. She was generally unpleasant, so no one cared. Even if I believed half of it, I refused to be impressed, and told her that traveling to exotic locations was completely unnecessary for her -- she could just as easily put shocking and disgusting things in her mouth at home.

So when she first walked up towards the bowl of snails and proclaimed how delicious they smelled, I know I rolled my eyes. For one, there were so many airborne spices and grilling meats and smoke wafting through this Marrakech market that it was humanly impossible for a person to smell a bunch of live snails in a bowl from several yards away. And two, even if she could smell them, they don't smell delicious. That would be like me, in order to drive home the fact that I eat meat, walking up to a manure-ridden field of grazing cows and proclaiming, "Mmmmm, this beef sure does smell delicious!"

This woman had been trying to shock and impress us for days with ever-escalating stories of the gross things she had eaten, but she did it in such a smug, obnoxious way that we mostly just ignored her. It was like she was failing at a game that only she was playing. But when she was unable to join us the next day, after eating something relatively tame but that we were all specifically warned against, I feel like everyone came out a winner.

Just like I regularly tell my friends and FAMILY when defending my own adventurous lifestyle, there is a big difference between BEING ADVENTUROUS and BEING STUPID.