When You Gotta Go

Like most people, I'm a fan of clean public bathrooms. And these days, I'm often wandering around Philadelphia, without a home base to pee from.

So when I have to go, it's helpful to have a sense of the city's restrooms. For example, the ones at Borders (Broad and Chestnut) and Barnes & Noble (across from Rittenhouse Square), while easily accessible, are just plain gross, but good in a pinch.

But my favorite are the restrooms at the Sofitel, the swank hotel on 17th and Sansom. They're on the second floor, tucked away, and are clean and luxurious. By clean, I mean, well, CLEAN. And by luxurious, I mean that each individual stall is like its own little room: fully enclosed, four walls, with floor-to-ceiling wooden doors with gold doorknobs. And they have those fluffy paper towels that are paper but feel more like cloth. Lastly, they're generally pretty empty, which is nice for when you need a, umm, private moment.

In any case, it's nice to have a home base in a pinch. And, you can enter the hotel on the side (Sansom Street) so you don't have to walk by the knowing glances of the front desk staff, though I have entered through the front, too, on 17th Street, and they're friendly even to non-tourist-non-conventioneer-non-button-down-business-looking-folks like me.