The Lord Mayor's Parade and some culture

Yesterday, we took the tube into London with the plan of going to St. Paul's Cathedral and walking to the very top. Instead, we were sidetracked by the Lord Mayor's Parade, which stretched through the streets of London. Most of our pictures turned out blurry, but there were lots of military bands interspersed with African drumming, characters on stilts, children marching, people dancing, and some flourescent orange rats on rollerblades being chased by a cat on some pogo stick/stilts contraptions. It was all very festive and the point of the parade was so that the Lord Mayor (we're not sure what his relationship is to the Mayor of London yet...) could present the state of the people to the Queen (who was around there somewhere). There were some high society looking people in the grand stands near us, complete with big, fancy hats, and, as always seems to be the case in London, there was a fireworks display somewhere last night. We managed to wind our way around the parade, using Jim's great navigating skills, but getting to St. Paul's at that point was not possible, so we settled for the Globe Theatre. We just enjoyed it from the outside and will go back some other time to see what the inside looks like. They won't be putting plays on there again until May, because it's too cold.

After the Globe Theater, we moved along to the Tate Modern, where we planned to maybe slide down the giant slides pictured behind Jim and enjoy some of the exhibits. But there were literally mobs of people at the museum, which made it hard to walk, much less enjoy the art. We plan to go back sometime when it's not a Saturday afternoon. There is supposedly a great David Smith exhibit there now, which we would like to check out.
Here is Jim outside the Tate Modern--which is a pretty ugly building and not very modern looking at all (as opposed to the art inside).