The Eiffel & The Falafel

Paris - View from the (almost) Top

Sorry I haven’t posted anything for so long – but D. finally had his short school break last week, and we took advantage of it by traveling to Annecy, a little tourist town in the French Alps.

Before that, however, we went to Paris – and FINALLY saw the Eiffel tower. Well, I’d seen it once before, but it was from miles and miles away, from the freeway, so that didn’t really count, in my opinion.

It was a pretty cold day, but it wasn’t too bad. We purchased the “mobilis” ticket from the train station, which allows us unlimited train and metro rides for the day for 16 euros, and we were off for a day of exploring.

We took the metro to the Eiffel Tower stop, got off, and started walking around, wondering why we couldn’t see it anywhere. Just as I started to say, “hmm… don’t you think it would be easy to spot?” I looked up and BAM, it was right in front of me. Pretty startling, actually, to look up and just suddenly see one of the most famous pieces of architecture in the world, you know?

This was our first view

Us, in front of it

D. and I walked around, then finally decided to walk up the first to levels. I think it was about 680 steps. When we came down, we walked across the way to get some popcorn and a crepe from a street vendor. Then we walked across the river and around the city for about 30 minutes, until we looked up again and, BAM! Saw the Arc de Triomph.

Awful photo – but look at the size of that sandwich!

By this time, we were getting hungry. I had read about a great falafel place in a magazine article my mom cut out for me from Bon Appetit, so we headed to the Marais neighborhood to find it. After wandering around and seeing both a Subway sandwich shop AND a Starbucks (can you believe it?) we finally found the right area. It was in a Jewish neighborhood, and it was pretty cool to start seeing the French signs giving way to store shop windows and signs in Hebrew. There were a bunch of falafel places, but we

found “L’As du Fallafel.”

 It was a bustling, fun, bright place with speedy waitstaff. I ordered a coke and a falafel sandwich, which came in about 4 minutes flat.

Basically, it was the best falafel sandwich I’ve ever had in my life.

The actual piecesof falafel were good, although they weren’t quite as good as The Best Falafel Ever, which is made by my old friend from college at his restaurant,  “King of Falafel” in Madison.

However, this sandwich was second-to-none. The falafel came in warm pita, surrounded by hummus, some garlicky sauce, roasted eggplant pieces, shredded cabbage, tomatoes…. yum! And it was only 7 euros!

Our camera was dying by this point, but D. tried to quick capture a photo of the sandwich… as you can see, it didn’t really work.

After the food, we were ready to go home. We went to the station, caught the train back to Bourron-Marlotte about 20 seconds before it left, and took the hourlong ride back to the house. All in all, it was a great day!

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