Pictures Of Sydney And The Airport (draft)

Amazing polyglot cosmopolitan crowd - Chinese businessmen and women reading Chinese magazines like they understood them, plus Korean students on some kind of field trip, plus Buddhist monks in saffron robes - just everybody!

I was anxious about my checked luggage. Did I understand correctly the ticket agent in San Francisco when he said that I would have to manually transfer my bag, since my return flight had not yet been acknowledged by NZ authorities? (NZ folks are worried about hordes of foreign welfare bums scamming the generous Kiwi welfare system, so you are required to have a return flight home before entering the country, and I had a separate flight back home, not a return flight, and I would thus have to present myself to the authorities for their approval. So, I ended up in an obscure queue in the airport, where, after an interminable wait, it was established that my fears were unfounded.

I heard a chirping bird, like a budgie. Then I saw it flying through the terminal - some kind of bird. Like what sometimes happens in big box stores, there was at least one bird within the terminal.

Shopped a bit; exchanged some money; boarded the next flight.