With the rumble of hunger in our bellies, I agreed with SQ that we should stop at the next place we see to get some food and a hot drink too. We have only one heat setting in our bus, you see; it’s cold and it’s always on. To combat this air stream, we were wearing multiple fleeces, gloves and woolly hats.

“This place looks nice.” said SQ, pointing towards the pink illuminated restaurant/motel signage a little way up the road. I pulled over and we entered the nearest door to be met in the hall by a skeleton hanging over the next door along. Oops, wrong door maybe. We stepped back outside and tried another, which happily opened into a bar.

A quiet bar at that: Soft maroon lighting cast over a moustached barman sucking back on a cigarette. We shuffled up to his bar, woolly hats and all. Squiffy ordered two lattes. With furrowed ‘brows, the barman presented us with two espressos and the bill. Something lost in translation, I assumed.

Sipping my espresso, I noticed that the other patrons were dressed a little differently than we had seen elsewhere in Switzerland. We were close to the Italian border, which might have explained why the ladies were displaying a little, well quite a lot, more than they did in the cold mountains. My ex-workmate, Carl, had mentioned that Italian women like to dress well. And the men here, well, there were no men. Oh, erm, wait a minute.

“Do you want to eat here?” asked Squiffy earnestly, as she scanned the room for a menu.
I whispered back, “I’m not convinced that we’re not in a brothel…”

My penny had dropped, Squiffy’s took a little longer.

“Nah, really? How do you know?” she said, bemused.
“Look at the girls. Look at what they are wearing. And where are the men?” I reasoned.

Just as I finished my sentence, a bloke–alone–walked in.

“There. There’s a man! Hah!”, a delighted Squiffy countered, “and, and… he’s walking into the  corridor with the skeleton in it… with that girl.”, she paused, “Do you really think…?”

We finished our coffees, paid-up and set-off towards the door. Claire still couldn’t quite believe it and only understood the situation as it really was when another man entered–again alone–and immediately had his bottom pinched by one of the snappily-dressed ladies…

Outside, we burst-out laughing and drove on.

“I take you to all the classy joints, love.”

[Squiffy adds: Even though he knew it was a brothel, daveb still left me alone to go to the toilet. Well, he says he went to the toilet…]

[daveb adds: I’d been driving for ages and needed to answer a call of nature. As happens with men, my bladder had put itself into “ready mode” as we pulled-up outside the place. Really, there was nothing I could do by then.]

[daveb further adds: And the lights in the far-away basement toilet cut-out whilst I was in there and I had to navigate myself back to the bar with only Nokia phone light. It was really scary.]

[Squiffy further adds: Yeah, but at least you didn’t have to play evil-girl-stare-eyes with a prostitute whilst wearing a bobble hat.]