Missing luggage, wallet, and sleep.

We arrived in Iceland early on Thursday morning and were immediately greeted by the reality of a missing suitcase. It did not contain any essential items for our first few days, but it would have been nice if everything had arrived. After filing a claim, we took a bus from the airport to the central bus terminal and hauled our luggage to our apartment.

That day we met our Irish landlord, John, and our two suitemates (the three rooms in our apartment share a kitchen and bathroom). Anca is a female from Romania, who has lived in Madrid, Spain for the past 12 years and is in Reykjavik for college, studying English literature. Andy is a male from Winnipeg, Canada, who now lives in Toronto, and is on his third stint in Iceland working toward a Ph.D. on Icelandic folk literature. We liked both of them from the start, and expect everything to go well on the home front.

After limited sleep for most of the week leading up to our trip, and particularly on the overnight flight, we struggled to stay awake and went to be around 8:00 that night. Amazingly we both slept clear until noon the next day, a new personal record of 16 hours for both of us. We awoke to find that our suitcase had arrived, but upon getting ready to head out could not find my wallet anywhere. I called and put a hold on my accounts, and we visited the places we had gone the day before with no luck. Finally we went to the police station to file a report, but it had essentially closed around 4:00 that afternoon. After going around to the back of the station and being sent back and forth, an officer came out with a small sticky note and jotted down our information. I have never been more certain in my life that nothing would come out of a police "report."

Thankfully I searched through some of Siobhan's things when we got back to the apartment, and found that she had mistaken my wallet for a piece of padding for her camera bag (in her defense they did look somewhat similar). The day was lost, but we were just glad to have found it at that point.