What is he wittering on about, this time?

Chinese apartment blocks are not the same as English blocks of flats. Those apartments I've seen so far fall into a similar pattern. Each apartment is (by British standards) a fairly conventional living structure, bedrooms, living rooms, kitchen, bathroom, and utility rooms spanning two or (more usually) three levels.

Each such apartment just happens to be a part of a tower block. However, being part of a tower block, the apartment is subject to a number of constraints that affect the layout of the apartment. The basic unit of the floor plan of the apartment is a quarter of the tower block. There is no requirement that an apartment have the same number of quarters on each of its floors, so the "ground" floor might be 1/4 of the tower block; the middle floor 3/4, and the upper floor 1/2 of the block. The exception to this is often the penthouse which is centred on the building, but the top floor, or two floors is only 1/4 the tower area. The central core seems to be minimal - the lift(s); sometimes corridors to the four quarters of the tower block; and sometimes there will be a stairwell up or down or both. These corridors and stairwells will be concrete and so are liable to be structural as well. Every apartment will connect to the core at one point (and usually only one point).

It is not even clear that there are common risers and fallers within the core. The Chinese are fond of the design philosophy that says "right, kitchen there; waste water will need to go there; so where's a long enough bit of straight pipe to join here to there". To their credit they do try to contain such intrusions into living space to high up corners of rooms.

So why all the architectural critique? When I had returned to Xining and spent some time talking to SnowLion Tours; they recommended a different hostel to that I had been using. Turning up at the hostel, I was a little surprised to find that this hostel was in a tower block, and indeed occupied floors 14-18 (the top floor) of the building. They had taken all the apartments throughout these floors and knocked them into one rabbit warren of a hostel. Of course there is no guarantee that floors in one apartment are at exactly the same height as those in a neighbouring apartment, so suddenly you have a lot of very deep steps, and high lintels. Oh well, how could that possibly make life difficult. It does mean each group of bedrooms tends to lie within one original apartment, and that a few rooms share a bathroom; and that there are a lot of bathrooms. It's totally crazy, random, and great fun.

The hostel is run by someone who has spent at least a few years in Europe, and has got a very efficient, no doubt profitable business running here. I am going to be here for a while, to enable me to sort out what next, and how.