Boat Trip

Hi everybody,

Waow I have to say that it’s REALLY hard to post something interesting on the blog after what you all have written… Anyway, I’ll give a try…

So, we had to give our impressions on the Boat Trip that we did (I won’t precise which day we did it, as we all know when it was haha) and I really enjoyed it, as everybody apparently. Indeed, it’s 100 times much more pleasant to have class on a boat and to learn for instance, about the economic impact of this harbor on Boston, than being in a classroom. This trip was entertaining and rich of new information for us so what could we expect else ? To do it again maybe… !!,

We've seen a lot of islands (there are 34 islands around Boston as everybody knows) on our way to Quincy Bay and hopefully, some of them have really simple names such as Long Island, Moon Island, Spectacle Island, Peddocks Island (Did you know guys that some scenes of Martin Scorsese’s movie “Shutter Island” take place in this island ?!)

We also have learned that Boston used to be one of the dirtiest harbor in the United States as the waste weren’t enough treated before being dumped into the harbor. Since almost $5 billion have been invested in the Boston Harbor Project, by the government to clean the harbor’s water and reconsider the way of treating waste, the harbor of Boston is now famous in the USA for the clean of its water. Indeed, you can’t smell anything when you’re near the water… !

Secondly, a huge national project has been conducted at the end of the 1990’s, called the Big Dig which has especially lightened the traffic jam in the center of Boston, and has made the harbor much more pleasant as a place to live.

Those two huge investments have helped the Boston Harbor to become as active as it is today. Indeed, shipping is still nowadays one of the principal activities of this harbor such as Tudor did in the 17^th century. Besides, fishing is a big part of the Boston Harbor's activity too as we saw for instance, many boats from Cosco, the Chinese company. Thus, it has contributed for sure to the economic wealth of Boston, but the tourism has played an important role in this play too. Thanks to the high activity of the Boston Harbor and thanks to the two projects about which I spoke before, the harbor became more attractive for the tourists as well as Boston.

Finally, one of the other strength of Boston is “dead people money”… In general, people used to invest the money of a relative died, into a city’s project and it has been a real factor in the growing economic wealth of Boston.

Moreover, people have created and built churches and a lot of institutions such as MIT, Harvard… to create a human capital in order to support and develop the growing economic wealth.

I hope that we could make an other trip like this one soon,

See you on Wednesday !

Jade