Thursday, July 22nd: Spectacular Sydney

The Masterplan
Sightseeing in a modern city is so easy: Public transport covers all places you want to go to, all sights are clearly indicated, and you can pick up a map just about anywhere. Life is grand, except for the weather. It looks like it's going to rain soon, but we have a 4-step plan to complete.

1: The ANZAC memorial in Hyde Park. An impressive starry ceiling looked down upon me in the building, each of the 120,000 gold stars representing a New South Wales volunteer soldier during WWI. Uncharacteristically, Blandine gets teary-eyed from the emotional weight of this building and walks out. Weird. I find her outside, in the park, want to ask what she's thinking about, but refrain in the end. Let's focus on other things altogether.

2: On the way to the Hyde Park Barracks museum, the beginnings of a Sydney drizzle chases us into St Mary's Cathedral. A quick look around this bastion of Catholic religion is all we need. Sure, it's a nice place, but 5 minutes peeking around is all we really need to figure this place out: we got cathedrals of this splendour in my very home town. What we don't have is a huge statue of Cardinal Moran in front of the cathedral. Would his congregation be called the Morans?

 Faced with the option to remain in this refuge of prayer until the rain stops or dashing up the street, we choose for the latter and make it to the Barracks museum without too much trouble. The barracks compound is a fair brick building, yet the museum really surprised me. The ground floor of the museum deals with life on Hulks, prison ships that lay moored in front of the Sydney coast. Upstairs you'll find information of Irish single women who undertook what must have been an exhausting, adventurous voyage. The top floor has a section with nothing but hammocks used by a group of destitute women, housed here in the second half of the 19th century. A great place to have a 5-minute personal chill out session. When we come out of the museum, the rain has subsided and we continue our way toward Circular Quay.

3: Circular Quay and Sydney Opera House: Every big city has a touristy central hub where folks from all walks of life hang out. For Sydney this is Circular Quay. We watch a man juggling a chainsaw; his colleague artist plays house music on a didgeridoo. Interesting stuff to say the least. After a quick snack we continue our walk and spot the Sydney Opera House. No need to walk all the way around the harbour to go in it, a building of this size is best seen from a distance. As good tourists do, we whip out our camera and take turns posing in front of what must be Australia's most photographed landmark. After that we stock up on a bit of energy in "The Rocks", a cutesy upscale area just west of circular quay, then climb up the toll road bridge for...you guessed it...more pictures of the opera house. We're lucky; a rainbow provides a perfect background.

4: A walk through the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney. Okay, that's it: we want to walk back through the gardens, yet it's too late, they close rather early. Oh well, we'll have reason to come back.

The one thing I'd like to accomplish here that didn't work out in Chile is to get a local basketball team jersey. I go through several sports stores, but it's not the season, it's not a big seller, it's...whatever it is, they just don't seem to sell basketball jerseys here.

Blue? Code red!
Exhausted, we make our way back to the hostel along George Street. Halfway down Blandine tells me that she's still not had her period and she's seriously overdue. I fend off her fears: "There's nothing to worry about, sweetie, we've spent a lot of time a serious height in Bolivia, we crossed the Pacific flying not so long ago." She's not convinced and I'm getting annoyed. "Fine, why don't we burn some Australian dollars on a pregnancy test in the nearest pharmacy, then you can find out the obvious and start worrying about something else. Jeez!"

We get to the hostel; I jump on the bottom bunk of our bed and flip on the TV, while Blandine runs into the bathroom. Not even 30 seconds later, I hear: "Jan, can you come over here for a second?" Pfff, what is it now? No toilet paper? I make my way past the bathroom door to find Blandine, trousers at her ankles and in tears. Has this something to do with her emotional moment at the ANZAC memorial earlier? Her right hand shakily holds up a white stick and she snotters "I'm pregnant."

When these words hit my eardrums, an alarm goes off inside my head. Code RED! Oh my flippin' god! I am gob smacked. Oh my flippin', flippin', flippin' god! I look at the box, read the instructions in record time and verify the meaning of the blue colour: yup, she's not kidding. My eye falls on another one of these test-thingies inside the pregnancy test package. Great! We're going to redo the test right now, in my presence, and rule out beyond the shadow of a doubt that this may be the one faulty test that the test makers warn you about with "The results of this test are 99.9% accurate". Blandine feels we should wait until tomorrow morning, maybe she's eaten something today that influences the test result. You never know with these things and redoing the test tomorrow on a sober stomach will indeed be better. I walk out of the bathroom, and look at the city traffic down below. My mind is drunk with joy and stress of this new perspective and trying to grasp implications on this trip, the upcoming PSE camp, the rest of our lives together, the possible reality of it all. 

Blandine emerges from the bathroom and I turn away from the hostel room window to look at her in the fading daylight. We study each other’s face for an eternity, as if we've just met. A smile, a tear, a hug, and time stands still. This is one of those moments that can't be defined by a single emotion, rather an incredulous blending together of many. We smile goofily at each other, barely grasping how profoundly our lives have just gotten entwined. Blandine grabs the camera, passes it to me and bares her stomach: the perfect background for a blue pregnancy stick. The sun is setting behind the double-glazed hostel window and I take pictures of my girlfriend's belly. It's hard to concentrate, but finally the applicator stick and her belly are in focus enough to rectify a decent photograph.

Mentally exhausted by emotion, we walk along Sydney's darkening streets and stop at Mc Donald’s. Is it Blandine's first conscious craving? Who knows, who cares? We eat in near silence, giggling to ourselves once in a while. Night has fallen by now and Sydney gets colder by the minute. Neither of us really feels like being a tourist, a jetsetter, or even a computer nerd: this night requires just each other’s company, no more. Back in the hostel room we watch a bit of telly, holding each other as tight as humanly possible. The goofy grin from earlier is still on my face and not about to go.