Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Travelogue: Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth

If you're heading toward Cape Cod, make sure you stop at Plymouth.

There's a great place on Main Street, Kiskadee Coffee Company (18 Main Street), where you can get a decent cup of coffee and free Wi-Fi, and lots of smiles.

After that, go down the hill to Lobster Hut for fried whole clams! (Delicious and heart-attack inducing, but mostly the delicious part.)

Then after that, and maybe a little bit of shopping or strolling on Main Street, where you can see women walk with pet rats, go to Plimoth Plantation.

I have traveled quite a bit, but have never seen anything like the Plimoth Plantation.

Its Wampanoag village and especially the 17th century English village are definitely worth the trip.

The Wampanoag village is small small-spaced reenactment of how Wampanoags lived before the English settled. People dressed in Wampanoag clothes will answer any questions you might have while sitting on dead animals, or crafting a boat, or making a corn porridge. The men are also scantily dressed if that is what you enjoy.

But the English village is even more impressive in my view since the actors there talk the same way English talked in 1620, and answer questions as if it were 1620. So, to an actor's question where I came from, I said the Ottoman Empire. To that he said he encountered some pirates once from the Ottoman Empire. I'm guessing they weren't very nice.
Then I asked him why would a printer (that was his occupation in England) leave London, come to America and work as a farmer, and he said he was the second son and couldn't inherit land there. All land in England had already been owned. But in Plimoth, if he worked hard for seven years, he could get a 100 acres. He would have been happy with just one, he added.

The whole village is absolutely a brilliant idea and a well-executed one. Together with the live Wampanoag songs, English women buttoned up to their necks next to fire in 87 degree weather, and live milking of a goat that didn't seem to mind it so much, it is definitely worth the time and money.

Go, see, learn, prosper.













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