We went up to the girls´ room to say some goodbyes then headed off, backpacks loaded up, to the hotel we would be staying at the final night we were there. It wasn´t too long of a walk to the hotel but it was getting hot already.
At the Achilleas, we walked in, thankful of the shade and cool airconditioned air, and walked up to the desk. This is exactly why we had checked about the hotel the night before with Niki. There was no reservation for us, and after the lady called to her people and found something (or did she just offer us a room then?) it came up that she didn't know if the room was paid for yet. Well, according to our STA receipts we had paid for accommodation till the next day, including this night at the Achilleas.
She told us it might take a while to check about the payment, so we decided to go about our previous plans for the day. We walked back over to the markets and bought the presents that we had seen on our last trip there. From there we headed back to the hotel to see where things had got. The lady informed us that there was no record of payment being made by any party involved, and that it would cost us about 80-90 euro for the room for one night.
No way we were going to pay that for a room when we had already paid for it.
We decided to go grab a hostel room instead and pay a little less of a tab. I was pretty pissed off. We had head from a guy in our Egypt tour group (who worked at a STA) that they make occasional mistakes and whatnot. Apparently, that seemed to have happened with us. I guessed that someone didn't pay someone somewhere along the way and we ended up losing out. I called STA in Perth, even though it was about 6pm there. I spoke to the manager of that branch, and explained the situation, getting in response that they would look into it and we would get a refund for that hotel when they confirmed we had paid them for it.
Well, Emma got us booked into a hostel nearby but it was just so damn annoying. This was all booked, paid for, and just meant to be...well...arranged. We trekked again with our backpacks, making our way to the hostel. The place was quite nice, and offered a laundry service which we took advantage of. A bonus to this place was that it had free wifi down in the courtyard which was nice.
We skyped Dad, which was very cool, and Emma got her photos downloaded to her Ipod. However, during my transfer some of the pics seemed a bit glitchy. Having disconnected, my Ipod made some weird loud disk noises and then crashed. After a soft reset it showed the screen asking you to reformat it by connecting to Itunes. !!! I quickly plugged it in, hoping the hard disk storage of the Ipod wasn´t affected, but nothing came up. I had lost all my photos from Greece. Like, all of them.
Words can´t express the feeling of loss and being absolutely shattered. I mean, I know they´re just photos really but most of them weren´t just candid snapshots taken by tourists. I had put effort into correctly framing, balancing and taking general care with these photos of things of beauty around me, and things that were worthy of being captured for eternity in a picture.
So, all in all, not a great day, to be honest.
We took a walk around the area, to clear my mind. When we got back we sat in the courtyard and had a beer. I was feeling a bit better already, but still down. We were planning to go out that night to a rock club called Decedance but it seemed a bit far to walk, even from the nearest station. Instead, we decided to try get to some bars. There were two noteworthy places mentioned on some blog site and both were in a similar area in a place called Gazi.
We had dinner at a trendy noodle place in a backstreet, called Noodle Bar. The food was pretty damn good and exactly what we were both hungering for. I think we both were missing Asian food. After that we walked all the way to Gazi. It wasn´t too far but still a considerable walk.
The problem with drinking in Greece is that things only open at 12, and only get busy an hour or more after that (at least). We didn't have much luck finding the two place we read about, even though we found the correct streets. We ended up having a single drink at an empty-ish place nearby. Em was crashing from tiredness and so I thought we should call it a night and head back.
So, bit of a tragedy of a night out. We walked the way back and crashed on our beds at the hostel.
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