jetlag and shopping: more fun than you expect

We've been here 24hrs, and most of that was spent sleeping or wishing strongly that we could sleep. Our flight left PHL at 10PM, and got to London at 10AM, with about 6 hours in air. That almost sounds like enough time to get a decent night's sleep, until you consider airline seats != bed. The bright daylight on arrival more or less convinced our bodies it was morning and I at least felt pretty wakeful as long as I kept moving under personal impetus - ie the 1.5hrs on the tube was a real challenge, even though my speed relative to the ground was pretty high. Having not experimented with sleep deprivation in over a decade, the experience was actually kind of fun.

Our other big adventure: shopping for groceries. We are staying with relatives or friends for the first half of our trip. I've read that the big budgeting mistake many people make is not paying much attention to spending at first, and finding that you've used up your entire budget before the vacation is half over. To combat this, and take advantage of our kitchen access, we plan to start out cooking for ourselves and eating as cheaply as we would in San Diego, and then start to relax the purse strings later. To that end, our big meal plan for London is beans and rice (with courgette, though a zucchini by any other name still tastes as sweet). Finding those San Diego staples turns out to be more of a challenge than expected, but at least everything still looks the same, in the cases where they have it at all (who would have thought that white beans were an exotic food?).