Friday, May 4, 2012

Adventure and Mis-adventure Vilnius: Prologue

We wanted to check out Vilnius and visit friends there. We booked a flight. We spent more time than we should have researching apartments to rent, going back and forth with our friend who lives there about locations and other issues.  We finally booked a place with Apartments Inn (www.apartmentsinn.eu). We paid our deposit.

Fast forward to 7 days prior to travel. I'm tidying up loose ends and realize I never wrote back to the place letting them know what time we're arriving, so I send a quick message. The reply:  Oops. We never booked the place for you, someone else is in it right now and won't leave before you get here.

Panic.

They added that they do have another apartment available, but it's on the other side of town and had other inconveniences. We're pretty much up the creek so we say OK I guess we have to take it, but it would be nice to get some compensation for the trouble.  They offer a measly 5 Euro per night discount on an apartment that is more expensive than the one we were going to stay in AND didn't meet our needs as well as the first one.

We spend all the free time we have for 2 days trying to find something else. We realize if this is the service we're receiving from this place before even arriving, what can we expect when we get there. We cancel and request our deposit back.  We book at the Stikliai, which has apartments as part of its hotel. We realize we're going to pay more than twice what we had planned to pay for our housing.

What we didn't realize yet was that it would be totally worth it! Here are some photos of the place:

The courtyard outside our apartment



The living room and kitchen. Why yes, that is granite on the counters.And a whole bunch of pretty glass tchotchkas along the top of the cabinets that were once within easy range of little fingers.


Our bedroom had pillars. Need I say more?

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