Loyola Is the Only Place to “Go”: A Concordia Bathroom Survival Guide
The Tiers of the Porcelain Palaces of Concordia
Concordia’s bathrooms are so decrepit and unsanitary that an entire student union slate won on a platform centred around demanding better bathroom conditions.
Armed with yellow rubber clothing and janitorial equipment, it was unclear to some if they were campaigning to lobby for better bathrooms, or to clean the bathrooms themselves.
Most Concordia students would welcome either possibility, given the dilemma faced by most: Where to do their business in a place that is better than a portable restroom at RibFest, near a food truck with dubious food-handling standards?
If that sounds oddly specific, try your luck in the ground floor bathrooms at the Hall Building.
If you’re feeling even more brave, head to the ground floor bathroom in the EV Building. If you remain untraumatized, congratulations, you may be ready for RibFest. But school is not some undercooked, wasp-infested meat festival, it’s your everyday life now.
You need bathrooms you can trust: bathrooms where there might be writing on the walls, but at least no bodily excretions or rodents.
If you’re not down for the campsite experience, check out the Loyola campus. For all of the abuse it gets, Loyola is actually quite pleasant compared to downtown. There may be no comparable food or shopping opportunities, but it beats studying with distractions, and the bathrooms are infinitely more livable.
Concordia’s best-kept secret is the sparkling-clean lavatories throughout its CJ Building. This is by far the cleanest bathroom experience and you’ll see for yourself. You couldn’t ask for a nicer window-view while taking care of business.
If you’re too urban to leave the city-centre, or just scared that the shuttle driver will make you throw out your $5 flat white to embark on the nightmarish journey to Loyola in the crowded charter bus, you have other options.
Unlike in a fire, the higher you go in any building, the safer it gets when it comes to bathroom experiences.
The upper floors of the JSMB Building are great, if you can navigate past the turbulent seas of students in suits and their occasional dirty looks.
Try to blend in with your environment and carry a spare blazer somewhere on your person, in case the inhabitants of this building realize what you’re there for. If everyone finds out about the cleaner bathrooms, they stop being the cleaner bathrooms.
If the trolls on Spotted:Concordia are correct in that no one actually reads our articles, only a few of you who read this will know about the cleaner bathrooms. This is our little secret.
The upper floors of EV are also great; this building is used for almost everything but actual undergraduate classes, so try to blend in discreetly.
There’s also that whole atrium section that seems to house blood drives and open houses, or events where desperately hopeful engineering students appear to throw their resumés as perfectly operational paper planes at recruiters.
Terrible Thrones
Ground floor EV bathrooms are a fatal error to make, something that most newcomers are unaware of. It is by far the most accessible bathroom to both students and the general public. It has multiple entrances, multiple events, and is on Ste. Catherine St. W., making a public bathroom for the Montreal community at large.
It’s about as clean as you’d imagine given those circumstances—spare yourself the practical experience.
The use of the upper floors is a total mystery to most, and their clean bathrooms are a mystery to all but some.
As for the Hall Building, where most of us are herded and housed, try to avoid these bathrooms at all costs.
Between horrific sights, smells, sinks that sound like horns, funhouse mirrors, mystery floor floods, broken doors, and holes in the walls filled with mysterious things, the overcrowding makes conditions even more like a house of horrors, and even the bathroom of a house of horrors would have a hand dryer that functions better than a computer fan.
As we kick off a brand new school year, we wish you the best of luck with your studies, and with your bathroom hunting.
