Group Outings and Adventures

I've been mostly working on my dissertation, getting out only for runs and grocery trips. However, I have eaten out and led group trips, so here we go.

A week ago Friday, we took students for a group dinner to Brasserie Julien, which is an establishment now over 100 years old. It is more exciting for its atmosphere than for its food. The food was quite pleasant, though not as pleasant as the price might have suggested. The room, though, was beautiful. It has all this art nouveau detailing all around the room, and you just feel like you're in Paris. But Paris where there's an old school cabaret and chanteure. Lovely.

After dinner we took the metro a few more stops to Sacre Coeur to watch the sunset. This is the second highest point in Paris (the first being the Eiffel Tower, of course), though the angle of the view leaves much to be desired. It's actually better to go to the dome of the church to see a lovely view of Paris. Nonetheless, sunset on Montmartre is an event. It's packed with people, and relatively few tourists. People blast music, sell beer by the six-pack, dance, sing, and yell. It's quite something.

On Saturday we took the group to Versailles. It was quite an adventure. We hadn't ordered our tickets 24 hours in advance, which meant David had to go out to Versailles an hour ahead of us to begin waiting in line. The rest of us headed out there later, were missing a few tickets, jumped on the wrong train, didn't realize it until we were down the wrong fork, had to change trains twice more, and finally arrived in Versailles an hour later than we had planned. Which I would have felt bad about if David hadn't JUST arrived at the front of the ticket line by the time we arrived. He waited in line over 2 hours. It's so not worth that. Buy your tickets in advance, people.

I didn't go into the grounds, and instead worked a bit at a cafe and found a place for our group to eat. We went, once again, to Pizza Capri, which is yummy and cheap. Pretty standard.

On Tuesday I decided I wanted Moroccan food and took anyone who wanted to go with me to Riad Nejma. It is on the plaza of the Centre Pompidou, but it's surprisingly not very toursity. It has an open, indoor courtyard built to replicate riads in Morocco, and it felt very familiar. They served their couscous dishes family style, which meant we were all able to try everyone else's dishes. One group ordered something with root vegetables, tons of meat, and spiced with ras-al-hanout or something. Another group ordered the couscous Fassi, which I highly recommend. It was cinnamon, raisins, chickpeas, chicken, onions....oh it was so delicious. Outstanding. Nothing was quite as spicy and delicious as we ate in Morocco, but everything was very flavorful and..morocaine. Yummy.