some dreamy, tropical place

I would be happier in some dreamy, tropical place.  Some sleepy, obsolete town with good coffee and unreliable electricity, with old buildings and deep shadows and the sound of a parrot outside my window and my only effort  --  such as it is  --  to find exactly the right word to write in my journal or in a letter that, stained and crumpled and exotically-franqued, may or may not reach its recipient sometime next month.  Like Levi-Strauss’ tropics, I am probably not so much a romantic as merely out-of-date.

Some would go for the beaches and some for the shops in town. I would go for a room off a garden in a large old house on a side street where a cat sleeps in the cool shadows and a lizard scurries across a tile floor.  Where it is always quiet and there is no one around and doors I haven’t noticed before open in the back of the mind.