Flying Away ...

Before you book your tickets, find out who else has recieved the scholarship, it's great to meet up with these guys before-hand coz then you can fly together and share a hotel room, company makes the experience.

If you don't need to go through the visa mess that's great, otherwise too try and book flights early, getting a return ticket for the date was impossible for me, so i had to extend my stay for a weekend.

Always check-out various agents and flight combinations before booking, flight prices can be weird, usually it costs less to book a round-trip ticket than 2 individual tickets for each flight and in some cases it's cheaper than a single one-way ticket as well.

Oh and try to avoid carrying pastes and lotions in your hand baggage, rither it'll be "too much" they'll make you throw it way, or they'll make you wrap it up in plastic. Anyways, I had no problem while flying in or out of US, but they made me throw away my toothpaste while taking a domestic flight.

Once you've landed in San Francisco, presuming your Hotel is near Union Square [more on hotels in the next post] you could take the BART [train] from within the airport which would be about 7 to 8 stations and cost you about $5.15 USD. If you're feeling rich you could take a cab which could range from $30 - $40 or so ... You might want to look up your hotel and the way to it using Google Street-view before just landing up there like me ...