That text was Lorem ipsum [1]. I had never seen that before and assumed that I had somehow gotten the templates for some other language installed with my English Pages install.
I then spent a few hours trying to figure out how to change template language settings or install English templates.
I eventually copies some of the text and Googled it, hoping to find someone else who had this problem and had found the fix and then learned about Lorem ipsum.
Nowadays when you create a document from the templates that come with Pages the placeholder text is in your language and is usage instructions for the template.