Aquaculture Training in Hamburg
An aquaculture training course might not seem like the most exciting of things to do, but for those of us involved in the industry it can be a great time to learn new information and catch up with our colleagues. We are looking forward to it even more this year as the training is taking place in a nice hotel in Hamburg. That’s right, due to a strange turn of events, this years aquaculture course was going to take place in a Hamburg hotel. It is really quite an interesting sequence of events that has led us here to this hotel, and well worth telling if you have a few minutes to spare.
Normally the German aquaculture industry will put on a couple of training events each year in one of the its many education centres or industry buildings. This particular event was supposed to take place in the Hamburg Centre for Marine Cultivation and Development.
Well, how did we end up in a hotel in Hamburg you may ask? Two weeks before the training was supposed to take place, the organising committee in the Marine Cultivation Centre in Hamburg received a phone call from an anonymous person. This mystery person said that a toxic substance had been released somewhere in the building, and that it was an unsafe place to be. The managers of the centre were confused to say the least, nothing like this had ever happened before and it all felt a bit surreal, like they were in the movies or something.
They managed to call in the police and tracked the call back to someone who lived only a few miles away, in an out lying part of the city. After an extensive interview process it was found that this man was a disgruntled former employee from a long long time ago. This man had been in charge of car insurance at the centre over ten years ago and was obviously still stewing about being fired all those years ago. Although everyone is quite sure that this man had not released anything, being a centre that deals with food preparation, the government has shut it down. It should only be a couple of weeks while the machinery and environment is searched for any substances that shouldn’t be there, but what it means for us is a free stay in a great hotel.
The entire training schedule has been moved to a hotel, and a lot of the specific location training has had to be cancelled all together. Because aquaculture is an industry that uses a lot of equipment and does require the use of particular environments, the training this week is now almost entirely theoretical in nature. This is a nice change from our usual training and makes us all feel like we are back in university. But the best part of it all is that we get to stay in a hotel for a week and enjoy some Hamburg sightseeing as well.