And another:

Nick and I had just come back from our trip to Biak. Funny - I was just reading my archives and realized I said almost nothing about Biak itself, only truncated bullet points that said basically squat. Let me be very late in telling you: our trip was crazy. The snorkeling trip was insane; we were half-mad from hunger and there was a storm on our way back which threatened to overturn our speedboat multiple times and flooded us so severely that two people were bailing water out nonstop for the entire two-hour trip. As for the fireworks, we both were still recovering from food poisoning at the time, but tried to eat goat satay anyway, for the celebratory feeling and all. It did not work. Nick locked me in our hotel room by accident when he went out to see the fireworks, and by the time he realized what he'd done and came back, I was beyond consoling. So what do you do when you're that worked up? You step outside, dodge bottle rockets, hope your head doesn't get shot off by fireworks gone askew, and offer your uneaten goat satay to fellow firework-dodgers (although no one else but us was actually dodging. They all had an admirable stoicness [stoicity? nah..] about them that suggested that whether or not a firecracker decapitated them was God's business and God's business alone). Surprisingly enough, someone took the satay.

Anyway, we arrived at the Sentani Airport from Biak and had a hell of a time getting on the right taxis, so our trip back home took way longer than it should have - longer than the plane flight itself, actually. By the time we got downtown, we were starving and Nick in particular was in a terrible mood. We got out of the taxi at Gelael, the indoor market, and it was mostly deserted, in fitting with the Indonesian habit of taking off not only the main holiday (New Years) but a few days surrounding it as well. The mostly ancient Papuan women who set up their vegetables in neat rows on blankets in the parking lot weren't there, except for one who sat hopefully gesturing at her three scraggly carrots and pile of shaved cassava.

She was either gesturing for our benefit or for the benefit of an extremely drunk and weaving Indonesian guy who was mumbling and tossing firecrackers at random into the street. We were the only people in the lot. Nick and I, lugging our suitcases and our bad moods and our empty stomachs, were headed towards the main entrance of Gelael when the drunk guy suddenly appeared in front of us and tossed a firecracker right at my foot. It (ear-splittingly) exploded about an inch away.

For some reason, this incensed Nick to a degree I've never seen in him before or since. His anger provoked the oddest series of responses - he was so angry he had no idea where to vent it. After twitching and shaking for a a fraction of a second, he eventually lunged at the man, shouting in a mongrel Indo-glish about how screwed up it was to throw fireworks at people. And he slapped the man's hand. Slapped it! His hand! More than once! For a few seconds, I thought Nick was going to chase him around the parking lot, slapping his hand and lecturing him on firework etiquette, and actually he sort of did, but he was thrown off his rampage a little by the man's outpouring of heartfelt apologies in his own version of Indo-glish. Nick backed up, refused to accept any apologies, and kept backing up until he was inside Gelael. Once inside, he yelled a little bit more while peeking out from behind the door, as if Gelael was some sort of passcoded labyrinth that only bules could enter. And sure enough, the drunk guy, for some reason, acted the same way. As we turned and began to do our shopping (me incredulously questioning Nick about what had gotten into him, him still to angry to answer) the drunk guy pressed up against the window shouting his apologies ever louder, but would not set one foot inside.