On Sunday we checked out of our tiny room and stored our bags, then spent the day in hurricane like conditions exploring the City of London. As I think I explained earlier, the City is just one square mile in size and constitutes the boundaries of the medieval city, which was connected to the royal palace at Westminster by a processional route. The City kept its distance from the monarchy and was run by merchant guilds rather than nobles for centuries. These guilds are something like present day unions, except they're the complete opposite in that they banded together employers rather than employees. Their main function was to act like a cartel, propping up prices and reducing wages. A bizarre system of governance grew out of this merchant system, where the various guilds and other companies vote in an unnecessarily complex way for the mayor of the city. Nowadays all the pomp and weirdness of the City's traditions lives on, but there are almost no people living there, just banks voting for a mayor who by virtuie of history has a lot of prestige but really nothing to do. He does, however, get to live in this house (behind the double decker bus) for all his trouble. The Guildhall (traffic free photo) is where he works (or not).