A Christmas Story, day five

For Christmas we were welcomed with the first sunny day since arriving. We used the closure of all the museums and most other sites as an excuse to sleep in a little.

Running in Tuileries Garden~Finally some sun!

In the afternoon we took a tour of Notre-Dame (along with the rest of Paris), then spent a little time relaxing at McCafe before it closed, too.

Street seafood

Notre-Dame

The Pieta of Notre-Dame, by Nicolas Coustou,
flanked by a praying Louis XIV and Louis XIIISome Left Bank booksellers were open

McCafe. I love the carrot art.

For our special Christmas dinner we went to the only part of town we knew wouldn't be deserted and would have excellent food: Chinatown. It was very A Christmas Story-esque, but we had fantastic Vietnamese Pho (soup), something very hard to come by in Italy! As a bonus, it was great to get out of the city center for a few hours and visit this new part of town, even though it was clearly in a rougher neighborhood.

A shopping complex in Chinatown, complete with a little cafe (foreground)

An Asian grocery warehouse!

Pho dinner. This was clearly the place to be: a huge queue even formed out the door and into the freezing street!

The Metro back into town