Sundays start at the cock’s crow for Pape'etians. This faded and stretched simile, is not, unfortunately, a double entendre, but in fact a nod to the rustic, colloquial call a roster makes as the sun rises over the city. It is an alarm with an in-built and automatic snooze button that cock-a-doodle-doos at 6:30 with the rise of the sun and intermittently continues at 10 minute intervals until… well… whenever he feels like it.
Breakfast at the hostel, I was told the night I arrive, is between 6:30 and 8:30am and I got the feeling this was to get the fat tourists their breakfast and then our hosts could get on with their day. But that thought belied the friendly and motherly disposition of my host – this time is in fact a lazy Sunday morning brunch for the people of Pape'ete. A lazy Sunday morning brunch, one of my favourite Melbourne decadences of the white, coolsy peeps in which I often indulge, is usually rustled together between friends at about 10ish… at the earliest.
But there is no mess or debris from which to pick yourself up as a result of a rowdy, obnoxious Saturday night – where we, of the white coolsies, blather loudly about nothing over the drawl of electric guitars and muddle our way through a dark night with gin, gin and perhaps a vodka cranberry. Ha HA HA HA! I’m going to dance! Should we go to yah yahs?
The night life in Tahiti can probably be found but the one bar I seek out, sold overprised, sugary cocktails and terrible (and not ironic/cool terrible… just terrible) euro-pop seeped onto the pavement like gelatinous goop. The fraternity/sorority type French girls and boys in misaligned baseball caps left me with an insatiable need to build a cubby house from my New Zealand weekend newspaper. I’d peer out, through venetians made from the comic strips, at the rabble outside and judge the boisterous gaffaws of the jock like boys and damn the petite nervous giggles of the girls.
I’m a snob. I’m almost 30. I’m ok with it.
The Marche de Pape'ete (The Market of Papeete for those of you not cultural enough to know French… or for those of you who can read the English translation on the street sign as I did) opens at 4:30am and closes at 9 on a Sunday. This, it would seem, was the only way I was to get lunch and dinner for that day. Thank god for the rooster.
Alert with Jet Lag at an hour not know to me on a Sunday, I make my way through the alleys and the back lots of Pape'ete. I am staying just outside the main drag of the city and said ‘back lots’ are a mere 15 minute walk to the CBD. Even so, there’s a cultural shift to adjust too. I feel like a rich white cunt traipsing though streets that are wearing at the seams. Where angry looking dogs tied with wire sleep or blink at me lazily and I imagine a mauling… Where boys with cool caramel skin practice tricks on bikes - again with the misaligned baseball caps… why are they so threating? - where old men smoke through rotten teeth and baby chickens belonging to no one peck at the stove-like cement.
I make it into town without a mauling, just a few leer-y greetings – from the men not the dogs.
Pape'ete is like an Australian country town, at 3pm on a Sunday – everything is closed. Everything. Is closed. And closed with an abrasive metal shutter. I feel locked out, self conscious and conspicuous. When I ask a local the way to the market, she looks startled. “Er… pardon, mar-kette?” I point. Statled eyes blink at me. “um… Marche?” “Ah!” She points enthusiastically down the street nodding, then escapes as quickly as possible.
Tourists seem few and far between – most likely making their way to their islands and cocktails.
Pape'ete is not the resort town I had been imagining – although there is a McDonalds. There’s no massive shopping malls, there’s no fat Americans in brightly coloured sarrongs and fanny packs. There are beautiful French families, lean and easy, as they negotiate the market with grace, engaging the shop keepers in lively conversation about their wares. I want to be them. When I grow up.
As I make my way back through the torn streets, past the boys and the old men and the kittens without a mum, laden with plump paw paws, soft mangos and bananas… bananas!! That are not priced like gold!!... peanuts and yogurt from the local shell petrol station, a young mum, dressed liked the surfer bogans I grew up with, smiles “Bonjouir”. A fumbling Bonjouir fills my mouth, embarrassed that I might say it wrong, and I let it dribble out onto the street. She turns to hurry her dawdling child into the car. The kid with bright eyes and an attitude in her voice that I don’t need to understand the words to know what she says. “Yes, yes I’m coming, I just need to do this one thing, this one thing, before we go” In other words, in my words, the world’s fucking fascinating and I’d just like to discover this one thing, just this one thing before we go…
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