What you can learn from my very rainy Olympic adventure.

Spectators, beware: your Olympic ticket may technically qualify you to enter the Olympic green, but it may not prepare you for the obstacle course inside. Hopefully, this post will. Below are some of the important lessons I learned during my day of mostly rained-out tennis.

• Taxi drivers usually do not know where the Olympic venues are, and the Olympic Green is just too enormous to wander around looking for them yourself. If you're hoping to get to an event by taxi, make sure to print out the map on pages 36-37 of the Official Spectator Guide and show it to your driver. Take note: the "address" of the venue, even in Chinese, will probably be useless.
  
  

• Taxis can enter the Olympic green as long as their passengers present their tickets at police checkpoints. However, most drivers do not know this. So again, if you're hoping to take a taxi to your event, you might have to try convincing a few drivers before you'll find one willing to take your word for it.
  
  

• Even uniformed Olympic volunteers often don't know where most of the specific venues are. They may, however, pretend to know and lead you in the wrong direction. This is another reason to bring that map with you.
  
  

• The Olympic Green is not one big continuous space. Each of the specific venues (e.g. the Olympic Tennis Center) has its own ticket checks.
  
  

• At least for tennis, your ticket does not allow for re-entry. That is, once you've entered the Olympic Tennis Center, you're trapped there. If you leave, you can't come back. Rain delays do not affect this policy. Commenters, please let us know if this is true of other events on the Olympic Green.
  
  

• There is almost no real food inside the Olympic Tennis Center, and anecdotal reports from friends indicate that many other Olympic Green venues are similar. They do sell chips, rice crackers, ice cream, beer, and soft drinks, but not much that could sustain you for the four or five hours of tennis your ticket entitles you to see. And while there are more extensive concession stands and a couple of McDonald's in the "Olympic Green common domains," those are very far away from most of the event-specific venues and--remember--once you leave your venue, you can't return.
  
  

• "But wait," you might be thinking, "why don't I just bring my own food?" Unfortunately, you are not allowed to bring food or drink into the venues. Enforcement of this policy, however, is inconsistent and arbitrary. After pleading my case to several confused volunteers, I was eventually allowed to bring in my crackers, but not my water. Later in the day, I met someone who was allowed to bring in their water, but not any food. Still, just to be safe, eat a big meal before you leave.
  
  

• For many venues, such as tennis, you might have a ticket specifically for a morning or afternoon/evening session. And if you have a morning ticket, you're probably wondering: will they kick us out, and if so, how and when? As it turns out, they haven't quite figured that out, either. Particularly when rain delays blur the distinction between "morning" and "evening" sessions, it becomes difficult for the venues to manage what should be two distinct groups of ticket-holders. As a general rule, it seems like the more empty seats there are, the less you have to worry about being kicked out. (Even though I had a morning ticket, I had no problem staying well past sunset. Then again, they never got through enough matches to even start the "evening" session.)
  
  

• Rain delays will sometimes entitle you to a ticket refund, but that seems to depend on the extent of competition cancellations. Make sure to pay attention to extremely useful P/A announcements if you're inside the venue, or just proceed to one of the information booths (where you can expect to wait in a very long line of angry people before you find anyone who knows the answers to your questions).
  
  

• There aren't many places inside the Olympic Tennis Center for spectators to seek refuge from the rain, save for a few woefully inadequate beer tents. But some handy overhangs do keep thousands of seats inside Centre Court (probably more than half) almost totally dry. So if you find out that a match is rain-delayed when you arrive, there's no better place to wait out the delay than inside the stadium itself. In fact, there really isn't anywhere else at all.
  
  

• While it is possible to get to the venues by taxi, it is very difficult to get back using anything but public transportation. And even if you're pretty familiar with Beijing geography, the Olympic bus routes can be extremely confusing. So before you head out, it makes sense to try to plan your trip back in as much detail as possible, using all the transportation information available in both the Official Spectator Guide and the Olympic transportation timetable (a pdf document).
  
  

Okay, that's about it for now. But this is definitely a partial list, and I will be back with more tips in the days to come. Check out CW's Olympic tips master list for more important tips to help you enjoy the games. Stay tuned, and please help us out by posting questions, concerns, or any additional tips of your own in the comments section below