Day 2 Papeete

This morning, I got lost. I like getting lost elsewhere, in places no one would normally go, uninteresting places, far from the hordes of tourists. But these lost places are precisely where you find the essence of the country you're visiting. Where people live. Here, more specifically, the Polynesians, whom you can recognize by their tanned skin, while the French are generally white-skinned, as Nougaro said.

I got lost in a modest neighborhood of dilapidated houses, where the exterior is the antithesis of sterile North American suburbs and resembles an Indian reservation. There is life there, but life is hard, and this disorder bears witness to it.

In our country, however, this obsession with order, where not a hair is out of place, is all played out internally with antidepressants, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medication, alcohol, or compulsive behaviors. People suffer in secret, and as Brel so aptly put it, "we die from a lack of recklessness."

Brel, the Marquesas Islands, that's the purpose of this passage.