July 26th. The Longest Whine

Today we rode our bikes along the river and to Hampton Palace. There was no one at the extensive grounds to stop us because most people were probably out drinking this being Friday. So we kept going and going until we circled the Palace, and went further and saw the beautiful inner gardens, and visited the Great Vine, the longest grape vine in the world, planted sometime in mid 1700s. So very cool!!

Imagine this thing being planted hundreds of years ago and the gardener practically sleeping there around the clock caring for the fickle plant unsuited for the cold and rainy weather. It did not get much better when the glass was added and it was possible to build enclosure around it. Now they had their reputation to worry about. The other guy managed to keep it alive and producing without cover. I wonder if all these years of caring had rubbed of in some way on the plant, which has now lived longer than anyone who had cared for it. I wonder if it became sentient in some way. It really is giant and is has large bunches of grapes growing on it.

Guards had arrived to close down the place at 9pm. They did not say anything about us being on bikes there.

On the way we also stopped to watch a theater performance a bit and give kids the chance to play at the playground. Onto Wales tomorrow.

Tried to buy the TV at John Lewis. Apparently this does not work in the store with unchipped card because of high risk of fraud. I may have written about it before. In Europe banks had decided that using a microchip in the credit card and having to enter the pin every time is safer and so they are telling merchants that they will not protect them if they accept "unchipped" cards. Basically it sounds like credit card companies may be telling merchants that there won't be chargebacks with chipped cards. Yeah, I want to see that really happen. But interestingly, progressively during our last three weeks here less and less of stores which had previously accepted our swipe-model credit cards are doing so right now. We have a visa debit card thanks to our bank account. I guess we may need to switch to that if we want to continue using plastic.

I came home and bought the TV anyway using our card at John Lewis website. JL even allows to switch the country to put in the billing info. How convenient! And no chipping required. Of course our credit card company had called next day to tell us that they rejected fraudulent transaction from John Lewis. Hmm. Our luck :) No TV after all.

All Stripes :)

Incidentally at Starbucks, they give you free coffee after 15 orders, not 12 like in the US. And you cannot use your rewards - UK mails them to your address and you bring that piece of paper to the store to use it. You cannot use your mobile app. We called and emailed to try to input our UK address to get our rewards. Starbucks suggested to open up a new account, go through 50 orders to get to the gold status, and then start building our batches of 15 towards that free coffee. So someone in US will be getting our rewards moving forward until we get a coffee machine.


One final note. I think advertising is too blatant here. To be point that it feels insulting to the customer. Like a photo of deranged looking woman with maniacal stare and a sign "50% off sale." Are they saying this will happen to you too? Why not 20% or 10%? Is this the borderline to achieve the unbridled shopping frenzy?

Also there is a drive to get the consumer to buy 2 and 3 of stuff no matter what. For example, buy 2 sodas for 20% extra cost of buying one. Or get a plastic water bottle with your coffee order for only 1 pound. This practice results in people over consuming and over spending and it will fire back. It may be an interesting measure to spur the economy but as it is, even with all the cyclers and runners around, overweight and obese are the norm here.

OK, one last but not least item here. UK government is working on a plan to put up parental controls on the Internet on the government level. Unless you personally create an account, submit your name, and opt-in to get content defined as obscene, it will be conveniently filtered off for you. Here is some heated dialogue on the topic. There is little to add here. It is interesting to see the overall trend toward greater government oversight and reduction of personal freedoms all towards Chinese model. Provides an interesting perspective on similar discussions in US.