After breakfast at the hotel we set out for the day's adventures. First stop on the agenda was Arc de Triumph! They were supposed to open at 10am but when we checked the subway time table to get there we noticed that they delayed the opening until 1pm. Well well, we decided to head to the closest stop and at least view it from a distance.
Turned out it was a royal state visit from Belgium that wrecked our plan to tour the monument, if you zoom in closely on Malin's already max zoomed photo you can make out President Emmanuel Macron, First Lady Brigitte Macron and Queen Mathilde of Belgium!
But it was a bit unfair that they were celebrating Malin's birthday without her!

After waving goodbye to the president, we strolled down Ave Kleber until we came to Place du Trocadero, a grand plaza with some great views of the Eiffel Tower. We hung out with the other tourists for a while and took some selfies, before embarking on the 15 minute walk to the tower itself.
Once we got to the tower and got in line, we saw a pretty worrying display, namely that the top was closed due to limited capacity. This was a bit of a bummer (ok, a lot), as we had bought tickets to the top of the tower (along with celebratory champagne), so not getting to go all the way up was kinda sad. Turns out that this was probably just a bad translation for "tickets to the top are sold out", as once we arrived on the second level, there wasn't any problem with getting in the elevator that went all the way to the top! The views were pretty amazing, and it was really cool seeing the Parisian architecture from up top! And we got our champagne, yay!
We took the elevator back down to the second, and somehow I managed to convince Malin that we should take the stairs all the way down, hehe.

Once on the ground floor again, we head off towards the Seine, and bought a ticket for the hop on/hop off boat that took us to our next destination, Notre Dame. They were still reconstucting the cathedral after the fire, so we had to settle for some photos of the outside from afar, and a couple from a temporary bleacher they had built so tourists could still get some good pics.

Final stop for the day was Sainte-Chapelle, a 13th century Gothic chapel. I wasn't sure what to expect, as we've seen quite a lot of chapels before, but this one had some really spectacular stained-glass windows, and was pretty cool to see.
Feeling well blessed, it was time to find some dinner, and as luck would have it, there was a kebab place on the way to the hotel, and for some crazy reason I decided to order in French, speaking more French than I'd done in the last 30 years or so. It went well, we got our food, and I even managed to joke with the owner!

We took a well deserved nap once back at the hotel, and about an hour later there was a knock on the door, and the night butler arrived with cake and wine to celebrate Malin. Jolly good show!