We hop off the train and walk to the little café down the hill. Their menu boasted an apple strudel with vanilla sauce. Somehow, on the train ride from Leuterbrunnen, watching Tony eat a bratwurst that the seller's husband made fresh that morning, I get an itch for that apple strudel. We've haven't tasted it yet, but it sounds good.
It's a tiny basement café and bar, and it is crowded. Every seat is taken. The all in one host-chef-waiter-cashier, offers a seat at the bar. I would sit on the floor for the strudel in vanilla sauce that I have imagined.
The little man ushers us to two seats at the bar. In the seat next to me is a lone woman. She offers to scoot over, but I insist she stays right where she is.
She opens the conversation with a question and we don't stop conversing through the entire meal.
There is a strange capacity to open up to a stranger on a barstool in a foreign country. Within the next hour, I will love this woman.
Pam is from Tennessee. Originally. Her accent is strong and she is as unique in Switzerland as all tourists are. In this short time, I will hear her entire life story in a capsule. She will hear bits of mine.
Her mother died from alzheimer's and Tony's mother is afflicted. As a nurse practitioner, I ask for her opinion. "Is there a greater increase in this disease?"
She believes so and blames it on our longer life spans and on the environment. Especially the foods we eat. She was raised on a farm. Carrots were pulled from the ground. Milk came from their cows. And then she uses a phrase I have never heard. "I was raised country strong." I love everything about it.
She was the first to go to college and she paid for it by farming her own acre of pimento peppers. She had a contract with a local pepper company. Her father helped her in the planting and growing but the harvesting was solely her job. The second year, she planted two acres.
When she speaks of her upbringing in the Southern Baptist church, her father a deacon, she explains her own religious feelings by saying that her family doesn't know if she sits on the bench or on the bar stool. Another euphemism heretofore unheard.
You can see why I loved her in less than an hour.
Pam is traveling solo. I have noticed many women traveling solo throughout Switzerland and in other parts of the world. For Pam, she wanted adventure and she wasn't going to wait for a man to travel with.
I applaud her independence.
But in the end, she admits, in that bar stool truth serum, all she really wants is a partner.
We hug, we wish each other well, and I walk away thankful for the guy on the other barstool.
PS. Both Pam and I are mesmerized by the efficient little man who's running the entire café. But in our conversation, we didn't notice what Tony did. The tomato soup I assumed was Swiss homemade, was popped into Tony's bowl from a can and slid into the microwave. My mixed salad was poured from a bag. Even the imagined-delicious, so-so apple strudel and vanilla sauce was popped into the microwave from who knows where.
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