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May 22, 2005
A Night of Good Food and Bellydancing
After the end of the first day of the conference, a small group of us joined Datamatix founder Ali al Kamali for dinner at the Rotana Al Bustan Hotel. We ate at the hotel's fabulous Lebanese restaurant. Within a few moments of sitting down, the table was filled with a fine collection of Lebanese mezes, small platters similar to Spanish tapas. A waiter walked around the table, serving us fresh scoops of tabouli on our plates; otherwise we got to pick and choose from the selection on the table. Some of my favorite mezes were served, including shashlik (a very sour Lebanese cheese) and moujadara, a lentil and roasted onion dish.
The group of us included people from Singapore, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Estonia (my online colleague Ivar Tallo from the Estonian E-Governance Academy - the first time we'd met in person). Everyone seemed to enjoy the mezes, which we ate for almost two hours. I particularly enjoyed getting to know our Saudi Arabian colleagues -- a father and daughter, both PhDs. Everyone was very open about talking about all sorts of issues, including religion and politics, so it was quite an enlightening conversation.
Just as I finished my last bite of hummus, a waiter went around the table again; I assumed he was taking orders for coffee or tea. I was quite wrong.
"Would you prefer the mixed grill or the seafood grill for your entree?" he asked.
I thought he was joking. But he was serious. The mezes were indeed appetizers, not the meal itself. James, my colleague from the Singapore, seemed just as shaken as I was when he realized we had a whole meal still coming our way.
Fortunately, we somehow managed to eat the entrees. I had the seafood grill, which included delicious samples of lobster, shrimp and a grilled white fish. Dessert was much harder to polish off; the waiter brought over enormous trays of fruit, accompanied by plates of Lebanese pastries, figs soaked in honey and rosewater, and a camel milk pudding.
Around 11pm, as we finished our meal, a Lebanese pop band performed at a bone-shattering, passenger-jet volume. They were soon joined by a belly dancer from Brazil, who left no doubt in anyone's mind that she'd been, shall we say, artificially enhanced. Mercifully, she didn't pull anyone from the audience onto the stage with her, though a middle-aged businessman in the crowd kept approaching her with cash, perhaps in the hope of her doing so.
"Do you have belly dancers in Saudi Arabia?" one of us asked our colleagues.
"No, her head would have been chopped off before the end of the first song," they replied.
Posted by acarvin at May 22, 2005 1:09 AM
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