The hassle that has begun... will continue

Well, these stories have been widely publicized so I won't go in detail into them... Basically, from making sure dogs are legal to more thorough Visa applications, we have seen it all in Beijing in the past few months.

Now comes the really tough measure that we all knew was going to happen: limitation on cars circulating in town. For 2 months - from July 20th to September 20th - private cars can only circulate on even days if their license plate is even numbered or odd days if... you got it by now. Although taxis, buses, etc, are obviously immune to the rule, many "strange" things are already happenning:
- People getting two cars to serve them: starting with the rental agencies down to normal consumers, there is a strong search for ... cars with "odd numbered" license plates. Apparently the Chinese prefer even numbers and there is truly a shortage of odd-numbered license plates out there.
- Dramatic hiking of prices for rentals: even for 2-month rentals of one car, one license plate :-), the price reaches the thousands of RMB per day. This might not look a lot to a European or American (1 Euro is roughly 10 RMB and 1 USD is roughly 6.8 RMB), but given that normal monthly prices are around 7-15 k RMB depending on the car, you can see the dramatic increase that we are noticing.
- People leaving town: for those who are not sports fans, a nice Summer break back home is looking quite good. I have some friends who have very actively planned their vacation for this year around the Beijing Olympics.
- Businesses incentivizing people to take days off: either through "plain holiday" on the opening day or Olympic leaves that match the number of vacation you take - you take 3 days, we give you 3 days for "free" - and so on.

For those of us who are really looking forward to the Olympics, we can only wait and see how it goes. I expect fantastic events but maybe some trouble getting there :-)