Having arrived around midnight, I caught the last ferry into Venice. I got off in the wrong spot, and my directions were unclear, and I started to walk in what turned out to be the wrong direction: the first of many, many wrong turns. I walked in the dark for perhaps 15 minutes before being found by an English couple who thought I looked like I needed help. They took me back to their hotel, where the concierge tried first to decipher my directions and ultimately called my hotel. He drew a pencil line on my map which meant I had to cross the Rialto bridge to a different part of the city.
Once I got myself onto the right side of the Rialto Bridge, going "straight" was a matter of interpretation, and finding the proper street took quiet a bit of circling. There is a late night party scene here only at certain osterias, but it seemed pretty benign. I was frightened by the tone of a group of young drunk men, and then an enormous rat ran across my path, which only made me mad. By the time I found my hotel I was rather wound up.
The next day I had blisters on my feet, so I wore different shoes, which gave me more, different blisters. At the end of the day I wore my third pair of shoes (flip-flops) which gave me the worst blisters of all. We ran into the people who helped me in the dark in the afternoon, and they admitted that they rescued lost people every night as they come home from dinner.
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