Change of plans and back again

The code of the backpacker is to aim for the "cheap".
I had calculated that since there wasn't very much of interest in Bulgaria and that we could actually save both time and money by booking a flight from Athens to Bucharest (in Romania), that's what we tried to do. We had successfully made a reservation and i got the confirmation and everything and we were going to save a few days worth of traveling and about 100 Euro and the birds were chirping and cute kids were playing in the streets and everybody was smiling and everything was right in the world.

That is,until I got an email the following day telling me that my credit card had been rejected (no reason specified) and that we had until Monday to fix it all. This was Sunday, meaning that everything was closed,which means that I couldn't do a damned thing about it. I did send a reply email asking what went wrong and left it at that.

Monday morning, I checked my messaged again and found that I hadn't gotten any reply. Seeing as it was now Monday, I went out to a corner store, bought a phone card (because public phones don't like coins here) and got a huge hassle from the lady over the phone. To make a long story short: my credit card was not accepted because it was not Greek. With the Greek population in Montreal,you'd think that it would count for something (I'm with BMO), but that would just be too easy. This is completely stupid since there was no indication on the reservation website that only Greek cards were accepted. So it now looks like we'll be burning up the better part of a week riding in trains and busses for about the same price it would have cost to fly to Bucharest in a couple of hours.

Rant over.