Being an Olympic veteran, I know how to pack for the Games. For example, I brought three rain ponchos and an umbrella to Beijing. I know this because they were all sitting on my bedroom desk when, soaked to the bone, I returned to my Media Village room last night.

How was I to know it would rain? The day had begun grey and overcast. This might be a clue to impending bad weather elsewhere, but not in polluted Beijing, where the sun apparently can't get a visa. When you have to lug a computer and backpack around all day, you look to lighten your load any way you can. So I left the rain gear on my desk when I headed out to report a story in a neighborhood called San-Li-Tun.

Once there, I didn't see many English signs on the residential streets. In fact, the way I was attracting stares I figured I must have been the first Westerner this place had seen since the Boxer Rebellion, which I believe was started by Don King and Bob Arum.

I stopped in a small hotel for directions and a restroom. The bellman's English wasn't good but when I asked him where the restroom was, he pointed up a flight of stairs. So good so far. Once there, however, I found myself at the entrance to a restaurant not a restroom. Too late. I was spotted. No fewer than six people rushed me, fawned over me, pointed me to a table, asked for my backpack, handed me a menu. When I said, no, no, I just want a rest room, they looked at me like puzzled puppies.

Someone ran -- Chinese workers never walk, they run -- to fetch a small man in a suit who had been sitting at a table by a window going through a book. Apparently it wasn't a Chinese-to-English guide. When I said "restroom", he said, "yes, restaurant. Do you have a reservation? (Damn, this place was classier than it looked.) Finally, after much jabbering on both sides of our linguistic divide, he exasperatedly said, "What is it you want?"

"A TOILET," I  shouted in unwarranted frustration. After all, I was the one in China who couldn't speak Chinese.

"Ah, a toilet," he said in suddenly perfect English. "Right back there, sir."

Leaving the hotel after getting directions from the concierge, I was warned that it was about to rain and urged to call a taxi. I refused, a stance I should have repeated later in the day.

A few blocks away, on a residential street, the downpour began. I tried sticking my head beneath the glass awning on a public telephone. It was no match for a head this size. I tried hailing a cab, but not many passed by and those that did were occupied. Finally, I just found a spot beneath the biggest tree branch I could find and stuck my computer bag atop my head.

There I was, standing still on a sidewalk and wearing the latest technology. The looks I got ranged from incredulous to frightened. I'm not sure what the passers-by were saying about me, but it was probably something like, "And these people won the Cold War?"

Finally, I got a cab and asked to be taken to a larger hotel I knew was in the area. Foolishly, I walked into the lobby. Another charge of the light brigade ensued, this time by about 42 uniformed employees obviously glad they now had something to do. This hotel happened to be occupied by the Croatian Olympic Committee, all of whom seemed to have umbrellas, by the way. One of the workers spoke Croatian, which wasn't much help.

Thankfully, after about 20 minutes, the rain subsided to the point where I could flee. I found a Starbucks around the corner. Obviously, the Western business model was in effect here. No one rushed me. The coffee was hot but the store's frosty temperature quickly transformed me into something like an unhappy popsicle. I sucked down the coffee, did a little work and walked outside.

It was raining hard again.

I hailed another cab. This time I knew that when I told the driver where I wanted to go, he hadn't the slightest idea what I was saying. That, however, didn't prevent him from hurtling off into traffic at about 65 miles and hour. We drove and drove. At one red light, he pointed to something on a Chinese map and, apparently, asked if that was where I was going. I stared back blankly before rummaging through my soaked backpack for a travel book that was now as soaked as my socks.

Luckily, at that moment, I spotted the Olympic flame in the distance. I pointed furiously toward  it, half-expecting him to hand me the lighter. He nodded and turned onto a highway that was clogged with traffic. Eventually, I made it back. Things are remarkably cheap here and the fare was only 35 yuan - approximately $4.50 - just about the price of an umbrella.

A LANGUAGE GAME: Listening to the Chinese speak Mandarin, I'm reminded of those ornithologists who can detect the meaning of a bird's chirping by the slightest difference in inflection.

 As if Mandarin words weren't baffling enough to an American whose experience with foreign languages ended with "I Am Curious Yellow",  one must listen to the varying tones to detect their true meaning. Apparently there are four tones, which is why a spoken Chinese sentence rises and falls like Donovan McNabb's completion rate.

As explained to me, someone could say "Ma ma ma," changing the intonation on each word, and mean "My mother blamed the horse", for what I'm still not certain. In Europe or Latin America, you can listen to a conversation and pick up a familiar word here and there.

Not so in China.

As a result, it's terribly difficult for a Westerner to eavesdrop on the subways and buses. Consequently, I've devised a little game. I listen and try to imagine that what they're saying is what their words sort of sound like in English. For example, the two women waiting to take my trash at breakfast appeared to be talking about "catacomb perverts Cinque and Hanoi" a logical enough topic for 5 a.m.

The two policemen at security were wrapped up in talk about "Saint Joe's going wide to noisy sighs". Basketball fans, no doubt.

Then there were the two mothers with infants sitting near me on the No. 10 subway the other day. Their words sounded like nothing familiar. They were probably blaming the horse.

Some Observations on Day 6 of Waiting for the Sun:

One thing that's not forbidden in Beijing's Forbidden City is aggressive peddling. Of course, wearing my Olympic media credential and my addled American look, the vending vultures saw me coming from blocks away. Literally.

Walking from the Wangfujing shopping district toward the north entrance of the 600-year-old walled city, about a quarter-mile away, I was approached by a nice young Chinese girl who said she wanted to test her English. It was better than my Chinese and I earnestly answered her questions. As best as I could understand, she lived with pandas in some city that sounded like "stupid-you" - either that or she had already sized me up.

Suddenly, in mid-conversation, she veered toward a storefront and motioned me to enter, saying she wanted to give me her email address so that she could continue her English practice via email. I may have been born yesterday because I followed. Soon we were in a small art gallery with some delicate traditional paintings and some of the ugliest and most garish portraits I'd ever seen. To my western eyes, they looked like Chairman Mao as seen by an inebriated Salvatore Dali. The fact that it was grotesque, however, didn't stop her from trying to sell it to me.

Had I been a Fun House operator I might have purchased some. Instead I resisted. She then tried to convince me I needed some of the traditional paintings for my wife, pointing out the Chinese character for romance, which, to me, looked instead like the pound sign on a telephone keypad. Eventually, she looked at my name on the credential I wore around my neck. In black-ink calligraphy figures, she wrote it out on a sheet of parchment. She tried to sell me that too. Fortunately, about this time, some other poor sap was entering with another young women and I used the distraction to bolt.

Once inside the Forbidden City -- much of which, plus Tiananmen Square, was closed Friday because of a visit by President Bush -- I discovered that other locals had been studying their English too. "Want to buy a Rolex?" "Olympic postcards? I sell you one, two, three, four."  "Book on the temple?"  "Book on the Imperial Palace?" The last questioner was particularly resistant to my demurrals. A middle-aged woman, she refused to take no for an answer, constantly lowering the price from 5 to 4 to 3 to 2. When I started to jog away, she jogged with me. When I quickened the pace, so did she. Finally, when I answered "Zero" to her question of "How much you want to pay?" She abandoned me. 
 
Some unanswered questions after a bus ride through Beijing and a walk in Wangfujing, a neighborhood filled with hotels and upscale shops:

• Why are the faces on all the mannequins Western and not Asian?
• How come you can't find a corkscrew in a wine shop?
• How can even hole-in-the-wall restaurants afford to have two people stationed near the entrance whose only job appears to be opening the front door?
• What did this city look like five years ago? Virtually everything seems to have been built since then?
• What ever happened to Communism's drab facade? Instead of row after row of East German-like residences and offices, most of the new condominiums, hotels, government offices, malls and business headquarters, which stretch on for miles along many of Beijing's wide, beautifully landscaped boulevards, are stunning, both architecturally daring and aesthetically pleasing.
• Do  the lungs of the residents here resemble the furnace filter you haven't changed since 2004? Even though IOC president Jacques Rogge claims it's only fog, the pink smog has been thickening steadily, like an overcooked soup, throughout the four days I've been in Beijing. The pollution plus the overwhelming heat and humidity make breathing as difficult as learning Mandarin.

A DINING TIP: Some things don't make sense.

For example, in American restaurants, we generally get lousy or mediocre service from harried waiters and waitresses and we tip them 20 percent. In restaurants here, you get fawning service from a half-dozen people and you tip them nothing. I guess the service charge is built into the prices, which is why a plastic cup of wine at the Media Village costs the equivalent of $44.

Last night, we dined at a "hot-pot" restaurant in Beijing's Westernized hotel district, where the upscale department stores and Mercedes dealerships probably have Chairman Mao spinning in his grave. In most of China, "hot pots" are the equivalent of diners, places where you can get good food, quickly prepared and cheaply.

But the "Loft Hot Pot" was a little more upscale, with an expensive wine list and the plush-velvet look of a 1950s American nightclub. At the "hot pots", you order one of five or six varieties of a soup, heat it with a candle flame and then dip all manner of stuff into it. It's a little like fondue without the gelatinous cheese.

While you eat, two waiters position themselves at your elbow, particularly if you are a clumsy American for whom the prospect of eating with chopsticks seems as complex as trigonometry. If you have trouble with the chopsticks, or can't pluck a piece of sirloin out of the pot, they are there to fish it out for you. Take a sip of your drink and they are there with a fresh ice cube to freshen it.

If only they understood the concept of a vodka and tonic. 

 YO! One suspects the policies the Chinese government has put in place for the 2008 Summer Olympics might not go over so well elsewhere, like, say, in Philadelphia. Officials here, in a futile effort to reduce pollution, have established a system for the owners of the city's 3 million cars. Cars with even-numbered license plates can drive only every other day during the Games. Those with odd-numbered plates are OK only on the alternate days. A check of cars along the roads and highways near the main cluster of Olympic venues on Wednesday and Thursday turned up a remarkable degree of cooperation. Locals say there's an incentive to do so. Motorists ticketed for driving on the wrong days will have to pay higher insurance rates.    

Welcome to The Inquirer at the Olympics.

Check this space for the latest news and information about participants in the 2008 Games with roots in the Philadelphia region: the untold stories, the moments between the medals, the highlights and the lowlights, and the drama of competition on the world's greatest stage.

Our reporters on the ground in Beijing - Mike Jensen, Frank Fitzpatrick and columnist Phil Sheridan - will use this blog to help tell those stories as only The Inquirer can.