Word: betel
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Anna's influence had all but disappeared. From Dentist Eskelund, who became "royal tooth puller" to the court, the Queen demanded a set of false teeth-black, because she chewed betel. But when he commanded her to "open the royal mouth" she refused, finally consented with the understanding that he would not raise his head above her own. Crouching, the young Dane maneuvered his tools into the "foul interior" of her mouth, stood clear while she spat betel juice into a golden spittoon. When it was over, she asked him about his love affairs. He replied by recounting some...
...Cross a Bridge. At Shrirampore, in a region called Noakhali, he settled down in a small, tin-roofed cottage in a dense tropical forest surrounded by ponds, coconut and betel palm groves and paddy fields. He dismissed his retinue of ipo people except for a stenographer and a teacher, who thought Gandhi at 77 not too old to learn Bengali. Often at Shrirampore Gandhi sang Rabindranath Tagore's Ekla Chalo (Walk Alone). Out one day for his afternoon walk, Gandhi tried to cross a bamboo-stick bridge, slipped and was saved from a splash by his teacher. Murmured Gandhi...
...Burma. But Namkham, its people and dialects were new. And the hospital was filthy. "The floor was stained with blood and pus and medicine, and was so rotten you had to step carefully not to break through. . . . The walls were covered with large red splashes of the saliva of betel-nut chewers. All the window ledges were covered with nasal secreta which the patients blow on their fingers and then carefully wipe off on the nearest projection. . . . That night Marion and I broke down and sobbed in each other's arms...
Usually it is a lot of trouble to kill a juramentado. The Moros are fierce fellows whose teeth are stained black and their lips red from chewing betel nut. A juramentado has the strength of a man slashing his way, with a wicked, wavy-edged kris, to a Moro heaven filled with sloe-eyed houris. When the U.S. Army first occupied the Philippines, many a soldier was killed after emptying his .38 into a Moro who kept on coming. So the Army switched to .455, which nearly kick a man's arm off but are no respecters of frenzy...
...peasants of Thailand, comprising 80% of the country's population, are well-built, short-statured, brown-skinned, good-natured men, chewers of betel nut, waders in rice paddies, to whom the West has been exposed for little more than a decade and to whom western ways are still highly adventurous. Even in Thai cities, the old and new live in exuberant competition. Bangkok's harbor is busy with superb modern port construction; but workers and engineers engaged on it prostrate themselves before Buddha. Conductors of streetcars are likely suddenly to stop their cars and relieve themselves behind...