Opinion: Why I hate museums

Graveyards for stuff. Tombs for inanimate things, CNN reports.

Their cavernous rooms and deep corridors reverberate with the soft, dead sounds of tourists shuffling and employees yawning.

They're like libraries, without the party atmosphere.

Occasionally a shrill voice bounces down from a distant hallway: "No photos!" and I swivel to see something, anything, that might be interesting.

But it's not.

Leering at a censured tourist for kicks says more about my own desperate situation than it does his, and anyway, it could have been me.

I unwrap a biscuit to get through the next 50 yards of 19th-century teaspoons and the same shrill voice rings out again: "No food!"

I've always hated museums.

Yet twice or three times a year, I somehow find myself within one, shuffling from glass case to glass case, reading the little inscriptions, peering closely at the details, doing what any "good traveler" does.

Two hours later I walk out bored, hungry and far less glad to be on vacation than when I went in.

The main thing you learn in museums, it seems, is how not to run a museum.

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