I had class for large chunks of today, plus an inflexible commitment to eat dessert for lunch at Bertillon (oh candied chestnuts, where have you been all of my life). So, preparatory to making it up with a museum later on, I offer a museum tip of the day: how to find a museum’s least gross bathroom.
This can be a big problem. First, if you’re an American travelling outside of the U.S., you’re probably not too happy with the bathroom situation per se: starkly industrial, under-sized, and always cold, as if every bathroom were a time warp to a ‘70’s East German run by midgets.
But add to this already questionable base a steady traffic of tourists, with their attendant kids, different customs of bathroom behavior, and jet-lag-disturbed digestive systems, and… well, you can imagine.
If you want to avoid this conflux of no-good, very-bad, break out your plan of the museum and find the bathroom with the highest number of the following qualities:
- Far away from the entrance(s). This is especially important for free museums, to avoid the “let’s just pop into the BM for a BM!” phenomenon (“BM” is the scholarly abbreviation for the British Museum, a fact which caused me to giggle like a third grader each of the 700 times I used the abbreviation in my dissertation).
- Far away from the café(s).
- In the most boring section. If you’re thinking “why would anyone want to visit the study collection of North American seashells?” you’ve found your bathroom hunting ground.
- And, for bonus points: in a recently renovated section of the museum.
