Laundry On The Road

One of the biggest challenges of this shoot was planning and packing for four such different climates.  Although we shot in two very different areas of Sweden, both were cold, wet and dark - and even though one was colder, wetter and darker than the other, I am counting them as one.

When packing light for a 23 day production schedule in four countries, one must count on doing laundry.  As I wrote in a previous post, we took our laundry to a laundromat in Turkey which became a ridiculous comedy of errors.  But in the end, our clothes were clean, and eventually they dried.

In Cairo, we have had two more laundry incidents which bear revealing.  One only is only indirectly related to us.  When we were scouting locations the other day we felt large drops of water - rain from above.  It was rain on a dry day.  In looking up we noticed that two floors above us, right over our heads, a woman was hanging her soaking laundry to dry.  And so it was drip drying on us.

Yesterday Peter bought some laundry detergent to wash a few of his clothes in his room by hand, which he did this morning.  He then hung them over the furniture and railing to his balcony.  Later today his jeans were missing.

Apparently, in the strong breeze his pants had blown over the side and fallen 18 stories onto a balcony below.  After a good hard laugh, they turned up.  The inhabitant of the room called someone from the hotel to report the pants appearance on his balcony.  Meanwhile, Peter had called to report what had happened.  

Earlier this evening, the jeans were returned to him, clean and folded.

Given our early call tomorrow and our long day ahead, I will hold off on doing laundry again until I get to Singapore.  There is still a question regarding my departing flight.  Due to an overbooked flight, it looks like Doug, Richard and I may have to fly on a different flight from that of Peter and Melanie.  They are confirmed on a direct flight to Singapore; we may have a short layover and a plane change in Abu Dhabi.  We will know more tomorrow.

If we do have to fly through Abu Dhabi, we will have a very early departure from Cairo - I think it's something like 3am, instead of the more civilized 10am departure for the direct flight.  A 3am flight will make for a very long tomorrow.