"Foreign" Music and Odd Time

Does anyone have suggestions for making an "exotic" track work for western ears? My thoughts so far are as follows:

I've been listening more to Turkish/Iraqi/further Eastern European music lately, and a lot of them use fairly odd time signatures. What they seem to do for songs that sounds more "western ear" familiar are create odd rhythm and meter but keep it more or less in 4.
Example:

With the odd bar of i..e 7/5/9 but being "completed" in 4.

Is this generally a good way to have something sound pseudo-exotic but not lose your audience? I mean there are songs that are just straight in 9, or 5, or Dream-Theater-circa-late-90s (see here:

but these are obviously going to be a lot more jarring as an orchestral arrangement if you're not overly familiar.