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...

Île de la Cité et le Quartier Latin: Un peu d'exotisme, Notre Dame, et le Mémorial de la Shoah

Revitalized by our lunch at the Crêperie Josselin in the 14e, S. and I set out to walk to Île de la Cité - where Notre Dame is, but also the location of a yoga studio we wanted to check out. This was no small stroll, but there was lots to see along the way (including, curiously, several Nepalese and Tibetan clothing stores and restaurants).

We passed through the Latin Quarter, meandering through the winding pedestrian-only streets past restaurants and specialty food shops. Suddenly the Crêperie Josselin seemed like a long time ago! A Tunisian pâtisserie caught my eye, with its window displays of brightly colored cubed confections and pastries dripping with syrupy honey. Suddenly, eureka! I spied rahat loukoume, a dessert that I was first exposed to at one of our after-concert cocktails at the music festival I worked for in Normandy in 2009. The loukoumes and other "Turkish delights" had been so delightful, that I made a point of remembering the name so that I could seek it out again someday.

The texture of loukoume can best be compared to Japanese mochi - chewy, sweet, and dusted with powder. Out of a choice between citron (lemon), pistache (pistachio) and rose, we picked one big rose-flavored cube to split. The best pleasure 1euro50 can buy!

We continued onto the Île de la Cité, walking past the throngs waiting to get into Notre Dame cathedral. Since 1) I hate lines, 2) I hate spending time at touristy spots, and 3) I visited the cathedral with a tour group when I first visited France my sophomore year of high school, Notre Dame is definitely not on my list of places I need to go this time around. I'll go ahead and offer a 4) and say that: 4) I've always kind of felt that once you've seen a few old Gothic cathedral, you've got the basic idea...

We also happened upon le Mémorial de la Shoah, so we decided to go in. It's a stunning memorial: you descend via stairs into a high-walled courtyard with spiked bars attached to the wall facing the Seine. Then you enter a chamber where an eternal light is glowing, and quotes from major French thinkers and writers about humanity and loss figure prominently on the walls in rough, spiky black script. There is a long corridor you can look down (but not enter) with what look like shelves of glistening marbles; I took them to represent all the French (Jews, political activists, gays, and others) people who were deported by the Nazi and the Vichy regime. I found the whole experience to be very moving, and thought it one of the most well-done monuments I've been to.