"You always have to expect the unexpected and even then everything comes different.”

Cambodia- more different than same same

Today a short note from the production assistant and her summary about the Cambodian Way of Live: “ You always have to expect the unexpected and even then everything comes different.”
When we finally decided to realize the movie, a small crew flew to Cambodia in the middle of October 2008. After handling the travel preparation such as vaccinations, getting the Visa, checking the clothes etc. everybody sat in the plane finally. I was still in Germany and very excited if everything will run well. In Cambodia they were received by Sovichea, the Cambodian line producer and Sithon, the location manager. The plan was: bringing the luggage to the Hotel in which they assumed to stay and start to work. There was no time to lose.
But you can do nothing, even a written confirmation doesn´t help you anymore, if there is a huge steel chain at the hotel gate and nobody let you in. No room, no sleep, only a lot of luggage.

The German line producer Jan checked out a new hotel immediately where they and the rest of our crewwe stayed until the end. Our next Phnone call was as follows (in this moment I did not know anything about these events):
Me: “And everything fine?”
He: “Yes, everything good”, and then he said nearly incidentally „we only had a big steel chain at the hotel gate and could not check in the Hotel. I think they will never open again and we had to find another hotel. ”

First I thought this is just a joke... but unfortunately it was not-
“Welcome to Cambodia”.
Jan was very relaxed and it seems like he was already one step aheadaid already and that he understood that nothing can be planned for sure in advance as you normally do.

Thanks to Hotel Cambodiana and his staff for providing us always such a good service!