The day started with a magical sunrise on the beach. This was a Friday and apparently, in Australia, it is very common to have your birthday off work. And Mikael has something called RDO, meaning that his normal work week is 38h but he works 40 and when he has 8h total, which is once per month, he gets a day off. So we both had my birthday off, which was unusual and luxurious.

I will probably always miss sunsets over the water, but having find a fairly normal routine around the fact that the days start earlier here than in Sweden, I don’t find it too hard to get up early to watch the sunrise. Especially not this time of year when the sun doesn’t rise until 6 am. And we still have more than a month until winter solstice when the sun doesn’t rise until 6:37 am.

After the sunrise, I went to Reformer Pilates, without Mikael unfortunately, he was rather sick. But we met up for lunch at Elk Espresso afterward and spent the afternoon by the beach again.

After the cyclone (which I haven’t posted about yet, but will shortly) destroyed all of our beaches, City of Gold Coast has been trying to restore the 4 million cubic meter of sand that was washed out to sea, leaving extreme erosions and cliffs on the beaches.

One effort involves large boats with sand pumps, pumping sand from the bottom and closer to shore so the waves naturally will push the sand up on the beach eventually. They kept saying that the beaches will be restored within 8 weeks, but that is today, and they still look pretty beaten up. So I don’t know.

Fast forward a month to 3 May when Mikael brought me on a surprise adventure to Brisbane. We had long discussed going to a specific type of concert but haven’t done it yet. So he surprised me with tickets to Candlelight string quartet concert at St John’s Cathedral with the theme Rings & Dragons. Music from Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.

The candles aren’t real, which bummed me out a little bit when learning that fact. But in all honesty, that didn’t matter. The candles were flickering and really gave off a real and cosy look. They were all over the church.

St John’s Cathedral in itself, is like Australia, very young. Sure, construction started in 1900, but wasn’t finished until 2009. Churches take time to build, just look at La Sagrada Familia, but it is a little bit funny coming from a country and city where the newest church is from 1890. It’s different over here.

It was a very nice church however. I do love the architecture even if I’m not religious, and always look forward to see new churches for this reason whenever I travel.

Mikael had gotten us seats very close to the stage. Not that I think that it mattered as the acoustics in a church is amazing no matter where you sit. But it was nice sitting so close to all the candles and actually seeing Paradiso Strings playing their instruments. There were three violins and 1 cello and they talked about the movies and tv shows in between songs. I did feel the music, I did get goosebumps and could see the movie scenes before my inner eye, but I couldn’t really feel it when they were talking about the impactful scene from which the music came from. But I guess, since they are performing anything from Taylor Swift tributes to best of Hans Zimmer, Pink Floyd tributes and other movie music, they can’t be as hardcore fans as we are. It was incredible though and that hour went by way too fast. Highly recommend!