Our Urban Experience: Evening Three- Mataam Fez Restaurant.

After our long day at Montbello High School and Reverend Kelly's Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives Program, we headed for Mataam Fez Restaurant. This is to be our cohort dinner out, at a place that will be unfamiliar from a cultural standpoint. I, however, have been to Mataam Fez before, having taken my wife Shannon to the restaurant a couple of years ago. Mataam Fez has bellydancers performing during the meals, so I took Shannon there, as she is a bellydancing fan.

Mataam Fez is an unusual place. You sit on pillows on the floor and there isn't any silverware. The waitress brings a towel for you to drape over your shoulder for cleaning up and sprinkles everyone's hands with warm water prior to serving any food. Dinner includes Wedding Soup, which is a curried lamb soup, there are courses of bread and appetizers, as well as the main course. I ordered the "Quinia," a spiced dish of Rabbit. I wanted to be a little different. It showed up looking sort of like a Cornish Game Hen of sorts. It was good, but soft and messy. I used up most of my towel in trying to stay clean. We were also served desert. It was good.

The most enjoyable part of the evening was the fact that we met up with "Project Select." Project Select is a brand new program at the University of South Dakota, modeled after Project Promise. The Project Select folks have been in Denver this week doing their Urban Experience. They met us for dinner at the restaurant. I was grouped with my usual cronies, Lynn, Robert and Carolyn. We sat with Roxann and Kay from South Dakota. They fit right in, as they were the two "Elder Stateswomen" of their cohort. It was lots of fun comparing notes and experiences with another group going through the same program. At the end of the evening, there were hugs all around.

This was one of the more enjoyable experiences of the week. A couple of beers didn't hurt much, either.

We got home well after 11:00 p.m. and headed straight for bed, as we need to get up bright and early to head back to Montbello High.