LH Franz We had a reservation at an apartment/hotel run by reyjkavik4you. We walked there from the luggage locker, discovering that Reykjavik is not as flat as I had thought. Our hotel was at the top of a rather long incline which I found just a bit challenging, what with my old legs dragging a suitcase.
The check in was self-managed. Codes had been emailed to us when our reservation was confirmed to open doors with key pad locks so that we could enter the building and open the apartment door. Our apartment was on the fourth floor. There was no elevator. Once in the ground floor entry, we faced a four-flight walk up. Although I’m in pretty good shape for a seventy year old woman who doesn’t exercise that much, I’m not such good shape that I can drag a suitcase up four flights of stairs easily. I have a step-by-step system of taking heavy objects up stairs. It works fine, and isn’t really that slow. I was all set to start up when the hotel handyman saw us, welcomed us, and offered to help us with our bags. Betsy demurred, but I said sure. To the amazement of both of us, he proceeded to take both our suitcases which had a combined weight a little over 100 lbs. (about 45 kgs.) and briskly scooted up the stairs, keeping a rapid pace all the way to the top. He was about as tall as me, blond-white hair and eyebrows, with a half-smile constantly beaming from a round face. Growing up in Brooklyn, I lived in an apartment where one of the “supers” looked kind of like this guy. (The “super,” for those who don’t know, lives at the apartment building and performs maintenance and handyman tasks.) The “super” I thought of was a Russian immigrant we called Vanya. Unlike this Icelander, Vanya was always kind of dour and irritated most of the time. I dubbed our handyman “Icelandic Vanya,” at least until we would learn his real name. (We never did.)
The apartment was beautiful. A roomy studio, modern, clean, new, with a complete set of dishes, cutlery, and cookware in the kitchen. All we needed were some groceries to complete the setup.
After unpacking and deploying our electric outlet adapters around the apartment, we went down to scope out the neighborhood. Dinner was at a place around the corner. Betsy had a lamb burger, one of many lamb-based dishes she would have during this trip. I had a veggie burger that came with French fries. Didn’t like the veggie burger that much, but ate all the fries. It’s hard to mess up fries. There were a couple of whimsically decorated streets in the area. One painted with rainbow pride colors, one with race track lanes. There were, as you might expect, tourists taking pictures of each other posing and goofing around on these streets.
Around the corner from the apartment was one of the Kronan chain of grocery stores. Some of the food labels had both Icelandic and English labels, but we shopped mainly by pictures. I bought the eggs, bread for toast, and coffee I like for breakfast. The health and beauty section was rather small. I found some SPF 30 facial moisturizer, but would have to go to a pharmacy for anything else. I also could not find distilled water for my CPAP machine. We weren’t able to get the staff to understand what it was we needed, so I ended up using bottled water, not distilled. I would clean my machine with vinegar when I returned home to get rid of any mineral deposits that might accumulate over the week.
My Timeshifter app said I ought to stay up until 12:00 a.m. to finish my time transition. This was when the sun set in this time zone. It would rise at 3:00 a.m. We were tired. After a short Zoom meeting with Husband to check in at home, we plugged in all our electronic devices to recharge overnight.
Which is when I discovered the hearing aid in my left ear had fallen out somewhere between Newark NJ and Reykjavik. I had been operating all day with only one hearing aid.
There are a couple of reasons I hadn’t noticed until the evening: The hearing aids themselves are in-the-canal hearing aids, not as small as completely-in-canal devices, but still rather small and discrete. (The FDA has a nice summary here of the different kinds of hearing aids.) Wearing them, you don’t feel anything at all. They do not move around. If somehow one of them gets dislodged and falls out, you very likely will not notice it unless you suddenly find yourself unable to hear things. Which leads to the second reason I didn’t notice I’d lost one. My hearing deficit is “mild to moderate.” That is, bad enough to warrant hearing aids, but not bad enough that I can’t hear most of what’s going on around me. So walking around during the day, as long as the one hearing aid was working fine, and as long as Daughter (by chance) stayed to my left, where there was still a hearing aid, I didn’t notice anything. It was only when I went to remove them to put them into the recharger that I realized one was missing.
There was a short burst of agita while I went through luggage and clothing and backpack looking for it, but not for long. We were both just too tired. They were new enough to still be under warranty against theft, damage, or loss. I resolved to send an email to the vendor in the morning. Morning in Reykjavik would be afternoon in New Jersey. That would give them time to get back to me.
Anyway, all I would be doing between now and morning was sleep. So I put my one hearing aid into the charger.
We drew down the blackout shades, donned eye masks, and went to bed.
I slept for eight and a half hours.
