Thursday, June 18, 2015

Claustrophobia in the great cities of Europe


We had a great trip to Europe earlier this spring, which included several days of museums in London. Unfortunately, it was Easter holiday and half the population of the British Isles apparently had the same agenda we did.  The British Museum was so crowded that we left rather than fight our way in to see anything.

Here's the back view of the Rosetta Stone (we never did push our way around to get the front view).

The ladies' room wasn't really this crowded, but it felt that way.

The experience made me remember similar feelings of claustrophobia in other European capitals.  I wrote a couple of years ago about escaping the Louvre in Paris and about almost passing out at the Pergamon in Berlin.

Last year it was Rome that sent me to the edge, crammed with tourists in mid-July.  Here they are in the Pantheon.

The moral of the story is clearly to avoid tourist season; go in February.

3 comments:

  1. At the British Museum, and surely elsewhere, no time is free from crowds ... and if not tourists, then groups of schoolchildren.
    Here in Berlin, I haven't been to the main museums on the Museumsinsel yet, but the peripheral ones have been eerily empty!

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  2. Hi Kathleen! I live in Florence and I can not tell you how awful it is for the residents just trying to go on errands in the center of the city! also November is a good month to visit.

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  3. i was in ireland in october and it was great. hardly anyone there other than, of course, locals.

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