The ones in Czechoslovakia looked quite pretty when they did them up in candy colours, I must say. Not much of that fancy-schmancy stuff in China. Ours is a kind of dark green with the hospital-green tone to it, although the balconies do give a vaguely art deco feel, if you’re drunk or congenitally positive-thinking.

I have many a relative who lives in the old Soviet-style blocks in Hungary- I remember once meeting a backpacker in Hungary who was really excited about going to Poland to see a “model Soviet village” and thinking she was an idiot. In recent years though they’ve started painting them so the outsides are now various pastel colors instead of gray, and I’ve gotta say it’s a vast improvement.

There isn’t a lot of spitting here in Harbin, but, boy, our stairwell is depressing. Met another laowai while we were skiing, and he agreed that that’s just how things are in the centre: he used to live in Guangzhou, where, like Kunming, Beijing, Shanghai there are a tonne of laowai blocks, although in Kunming we lived out of the centre rather than in these old buildings.

Does your door have one of those weird keyholes where you have to turn a safe-style dial to bizarre clock positions before you can get the key in? I’m wondering if there was some nationwide 5-year-plan to raze hutongs and replace them with these blocks…

All for the good, I hope, eventually…