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...

Vue de la Seine

Not the greatest photo, but here's a view of the Seine river from the apartment where I'm staying. Early evening, that's why the trees in the back are lit up (which is why I took the picture in the first place). If you followed the métro line from left to right over the Seine, you'd be headed towards the Quai de la Gare stop on M6 (green) line. The Bibliothèque nationale de France (national library) can also be seen from this same window!

Must sleep now, if I follow through on my plan to go jogging tomorrow morning...when I first arrived I was thrilled to see a few pairs of French people jogging along the Seine (including some very fit pompiers - firemen), so I won't look like an idiot (as I did the one time I tried running in Lisieux, Normandy!)

The View from Our House in Fianar

We arrived in Fianar in the dark, so we really didn't get a sense of what everything looked like until the next day. I took this picture [double click on it to view it large] out our upstairs window on the first morning (since I was up at 4:30 and couldn't fall back to sleep). You can see houses along the hillsides - everything is sprawling and terraced, built on the slopes. The roads are unpaved - which is why I slipped and fell the other night as we walked home from the office next door (I now have a lovely purple bruise on my right side!).
In the yard you can see the turkey sitting on a car parked near the clotheslines. The edge of the wall is lined with large shards of bottle glass sticking straight up, to prevent intruders from climbing over the wall; for some reason, this actually makes me feel quite safe!