
Research Fund 23/12 :: Elke Herbots
January 10, 2024
New paper out :: Two Decades of In Situ Conservation
February 4, 2024After our third job at the Oceanário de Lisboa, and a second job at Den Bla Planet, in Copenhagen, it was time for our TechAquarium partners to head to beautiful Paris, City of Lights.
In all honesty, this was a monumentally hard job to get off the ground, because extremely tight immigration and labor laws in France forced us to obtain an insanely long list of documents, which kept us really busy during the first half of January.
This arduous task included colorful moments, such as the fact that all the insurance companies we requested a ‘Civil Responsibility’ policy from would deny it because they didn’t like the work was done underwater. We then finally got a positive answer and the insurance policy came back, but… The ‘Exclusions’ section mentioned, you guessed it, “underwater works”.
#wtf
Needless to say we fixed that problem, along with countless others, and the TechAquarium team has been hard at work polishing acrylic panels scratched by walruses, seals, and polar bears in nearly freezing water, while polishing away romantic hearts and loving messages on the outside because, after all, the City of Lights is famous for… L’Amour!!
But deeply scratched acrylics, (very) cold water, (very) cold air, and a (very) long list of required documents weren’t our only problems, because the Picardy Hotel managed to present us with the worst possible experience EVER, and we’ve stayed in some pretty cheap dumps over the years! Of course our staff deserves much better, so we left their premises in haste, but stay the hell away from it if you want to enjoy this beautiful city.
To end things on a positive note, this cute little cowfish is doing all the publicity for us, sincewe do advertise that our polishing has extremely reduced noise and absolutely no residue at all. They say “a picture is worth more than a thousand words”… Well, this video below is worth a million!