True, but there's an important piece to this story that we are forgetting: the OP never really performed any type of currency exchange at the hotel. I think everybody knows that changing hard currency at a hotel is a very bad thing to do. You will get soaked. But in this case, not only did the OP not want to perform any exchange at all, but the "conversion" to rubles was simply a paper calculation - not a real exchange. As such, at a bare minimum, it should have been done at the fair rate.