The Zenith Hotel

We had planned to go climb a mountain to a monument today but it was very overcast, so we went to the centre of town to do several things: we had heard of a hotel with a double room for 600DR each with heating - heat being the important factor. We had the phone number but not the address. Eventually we tracked it down. It is called Zenith Hotel, and is down a dark and dingy ally, that smells of piss, and has rubbish every where. The place looked fine and is closer to the centre of the city. So we paid and decided to move our things over later in the day. Next we checked the Poste Restante - nothing - then we went walking, saw another post office and on the off chance went in to ask there as well. Sure enough we had been checking the wrong post office. There were cards and letters for us. We went to a travel agent to see if there were any cheap get aways to any where hot. He said no, so we asked about ski resorts, where we could look for work. He gave us the address of a ski foundation. We tracked that down to the third floor of a office with 2 very friendly girls who gave us tea, and explained that most of the ski resorts are government owned and so can only hire Greeks. They said there was one private resort and she got us on the phone with the manager, who agreed to meet us the next day.

Next we went to the museum of archeology where there were some wonderful statues, and bronze work. We then went back to the hostel collected our belongings and lugged everything back to our new abode.

We had half a hamburger and a salad for dinner and squeezed onto one of the stuffed trams(free of course). Once in our new room in the centre of town, we realized how dirty it was. Layers of dirt on everything. Paint peeling off the walls. Curtains brown and ripped unevenly to fit the windows. Very high ceilings, dim lighting. The interior reminded me of a scene out of Oliver Twist in Fagan's den. The corridors were very narrow and the wooden floors appeared to be gang planks over something else. Probably dead bodies. The rooms, apart from the dirt were bearable, but there was no question about leaving our room at any point until day break. We went to sleep with our pen knives in our hands, and balanced on the beds in our sleeping bags, fearing body, hair or any other form of lice.