Alex is very good about surprising me, so I generally don’t ask questions when he says he’ll take me out. Saturday night we went up to Capitol Hill and walked in off the Seattle street to find a belly dancer shimmying between low tables arranged in a semi-circle against the walls in a silk-bedecked dining space. Equally mesmerized by her movements, I missed my chance to pretend outrage at being taken to an establishment featuring scantily clad lady dancers.

We were seated, ordered drinks, and didn’t make a food choice until the dancer was done. For one song she took an ornamental sword, balanced it on her head, and continued to twitch her hips electrically. If I could move my hips like that, I’d set out to make civilizations fall. The hips that launched a thousand ships… Towards the end, she got one woman up to dance with her, to the obviously overwhelming embarassment of her teenage daughter, who blushed and watched in horror from her father’s side. Perhaps most impressive of all, she did it all in heels.

We chose our main entrees, and a succession of dishes arrived at the table for a five course meal. First the waitress brought out a large silver bowl with a latticed cover, and instructed us how to wash our hands as she poured water over them from a similarly ornate silver kettle.

The opening course was lentil soup, followed by a salad — shredded carrots, sliced cucumber and pickled beets. Utensils are provided if you ask, but we didn’t have any particular trouble eating with our fingers. With our hand-washing, we’d been provided with towels, which doubled as our napkins for the meal.

Next was a plate with a circle of filo dough sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar. Inside was a mixture of chicken and almonds, sweet and delicious. By this time there was no urgent edge left to my hunger, the drink was kicking in, it was warm and comfortingly decorated, the semi-circular seating left everyone open for informal people-watching not usually available in restaurants, and I was starting to purr in a state of utter contentment.

For the main course I had a trio of kebabs — lamb, chicken and beef. It came on a plate with saffron rice and bell peppers in a tomato-ey sauce. Alex got Kefta, meatballs, something he recalled fondly from visiting Turkey. They gave us a basket of sweet, spiced bread to use as scoops. The lamb was particularly delicious, and I soon figured out a good method for eating rice with your fingers. Alex’s kefta was also tasty, although it came with two soft-cooked eggs on top, to his mild puzzlement. We shared and shared alike, and he wondered aloud whose food he will steal when he’s in China.

The desert was a slice of light cake with more powdered sugar and some strawberry sauce drizzled over it, accompanied with glasses of sweet mint tea. Alex tasted his with some trepidation, as he doesn’t generally approve of mint, but since it tasted mostly like sugar, it was okay.

About the time we finished eating, the belly dancer came back for another show. This time we watched our fellow diners as well. In one couple, the woman forced the man to move up to the seat by the wall, and took the cushioned seat on the floor, so he would be out of the dancer’s physical reach. (During the first song, she was using a scarf, and gleefully floating it over the heads of those closest to the center.) Across from us, a group of four couples also seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the show, making efforts to concentrate on their discussion, and not look away from their table tops. In her involve-the-audience song, though, the dancer did get one of the guys from this group up and attempting to shake his hips, to the amusement of all. We clapped for them both, and headed downtown, where we saw The Prestige, a well crafted film which had things at the end still to surprise me with, even though I thought I had most everything figured out.

When I looked up the restaurant, though, it seems not everyone finds it as impressive as I did. Maybe another time we’ll have to go to Marrakesh, in Belltown, instead.

Turns out that if you asked the right (or wrong?) people, they would say that I, in my shiksa-ness, am contributing to a silent Holocaust. Of course, there are rabid folks on the other side, too.

Then, there’s women who are looking for Jewish men, for the various sterotypical qualities they are assumed to have. That doesn’t necessarily seem like the best idea, kind of like wanting to date black guys because they’re better endowed.

The first link points out that “despite explicit protestations to the contrary, one cannot disapprove of a marriage without disapproving of a person because he or she was born in a different group” — ie racism, and, sticky though the issue may be to discuss, I don’t think you can deny racism in deliberately looking for someone from a specific group, whether it is within your own or another group.

I’m also thinking of a sci-fi book I read, probably sometime in high school, wherein the futuristic society placed so much emphasis on mixing of genetic stock that one of the characters was driven to suicide because she had falled in love with a member of her own race.

It shouldn’t have to be like that; there shouldn’t be societal pressure for either endo- or exogamy. People should be able to happily, freely choose partners who share their beliefs and passions.

But what if the shared belief is racial purity? Well, I’m backing myself into a corner, but I would assume at least they’d be happy together, though whether or not those around them would be is up for debate…

Having acquired a job that won’t pay for much of anything, I’m thinking about the material things I crave, mainly plane tickets (Boston for Thanksgiving, Beijing for winter holidays), a fleece jacket, a shinier digital camera (five minutes initial research points to something like Canon EOS 20D), not to mention vague thoughts of a working mp3 player, or something as simple as a Bundt pan or a new pair of bike shoes.

Oh, and books, but there’s very little that prevents me from buying those.

Having read a NY Times article on reducing your environmental impact — “The Energy Diet” yesterday, today I took action to call and ask Discover to stop sending me credit card offers. The fellow was perfectly friendly, and offered me another number to get off all credit offers.

1-888-567-8688 gets you the Consumer Credit Reporting Industry Opt-In & Opt-Out program, and although it took several tries for the computer to figure out how to deal with my last name, I’ll hopefully be getting less uneccessary mail and saving some trees. Also called The Company Store to tell them I don’t need paper catalogs since I only order online. I’ll try and remember to do the same with any other catalogs I get.

As the guy in the article points out, it takes very little time to make the phone call, and should save a fair amount of paper.