Saturday Vignettes (9/17)

The oldest continuously-operating restaurant in Paris, À La Petite Chaise (obviously out of our price range):

For a quick lunch on the go as I passed through the Latin Quarter, I decided to try out Maoz, a vegetarian falafel chain restaurant. At 4euros 90 it's a tad cheaper than L'As du Falafel and you have a salad bar à volonté (all-you-want buffet-style) that you can use to load up your falafel just the way you like it. The falafel balls are fried to order, too! A basic falafel doesn't automatically come with grilled eggplant like at L'As du Falafel, but the salad bar helps make up for it: you can get carrots, beets, harissa, coriander sauce, tomato and cucumber salad, and even American-style cole slaw!

Here's my personalized creation (lots of beets, carrots, and spicy sauce):

I did a big French faux pas and ate it greedily and messily in the metro on the way to the meeting place for CUPA's guided tour of L'Institut du Monde Arabe and La Grande Mosquée.

The IMA building is stunning. It honors the Arab-Muslim tradition of avoiding figurative decorations (depictions of people and animals) in favor of geometric patters. The walls look like monochromatic mosaics...

But once inside, we saw that the little metal panels were actually little mechanical diaphragms that contracted depending on the amount of light outside - beauty and energy efficiency!

This is the view from the roof L'Institut du Monde Arabe.

Paris is a fairy tale.

Oh hey there - c'est moi!

Our next stop on our guided tour was La Grande Mosquée de Paris (Great Mosque of Paris). Incidentally, it was built after WWI, before France had any significant Muslim population, as a thank-you gesture to the Muslim tirailleurs who fought on the French side against Germany.

The mosquée has a lovely little garden café where you can sit under fig trees and sip authentic North African mint tea from little glasses and choose from a variety of delicious 2euro pastries...

Then, after an unsuccessful attempt to return to West Country Girl for dinner (there were six of us, and we didn't have a reservation), we stumbled upon a friendly little Senegalese restaurant called Le Manguier ("the mango tree") in the 11e that had a vegetarian special, so we decided to dine there.

You simply can't go wrong with vegetable stew, rice, and sweet fried plantains...