Illustration: Xia Qing/GT

For the last four years I have lived in China, I have had it pretty easy in the housing department. The dormitories and apartments provided by my various employers were clean, rent free, relatively modern, and had no strings attached. Yet a change in employment meant signing a contract on a house and actually paying rent. My partner and I made the decision to rent a hutong house, which comes with its pros and cons.

Compared to living situations in the UK and the high tech apartments of South Korea where I lived for three years, hutong houses are different to say the least.

There are of a lot of pros. I would not have chosen to live in one otherwise. A renovated hutong house can be just as comfortable as any apartment. They can be affordable (if you find the right one), and convenient, especially where I live in the Yonghegong Lama Temple area, in terms of transport, dining options, and shopping. And of course, there is the feeling that you are really living in Beijing, being in an old house with a tiled roof and little courtyards dotted around it - there is no mistaking where you are waking up in the morning.

Of course, there are some downsides in the eyes of a foreigner not used to hutong living. For a start, old houses means things do not always work as well as you might hope. Pipes leak, renovations might have been done a little too haphazardly, so the less home maintenance savvy might face a steep learning curve.

You see and hear a lot of your neighbors. Compared to the compartmentalized privacy of apartments, hutong digs are intimate. Right in the middle of the entrance to the little passage leading to my house, my elderly neighbors like to set up a table for games of mahjong. Their mahjong games seem to be more important than somebody with a bicycle trying to get past, given the amount of time it takes for them to actually move and let somebody by. And then there are the hilarious standoffs that occur any time two cars driving down the hutong come face to face, causing a gridlock of middle school students on bicycles and disgruntled old men in rickshaws.

The biggest challenge of hutong living came last week around midnight when raw sewage water started fountaining up through the drain in our bathroom. We promptly called our landlord to ask why this was happening. She had no idea. We had not put anything "inappropriate" down the toilet and had experienced no problems before.

The cause became apparent when we discovered that we shared a sewer pipe with the house next door. They, coincidentally, were also experiencing dirty water flooding out of the floor at exactly the same time. Upon investigation, it transpired that our foreign neighbors had been flushing their toilet paper, blissfully unaware that you totally should not do that as hutong plumbing can't handle it.

Thanks to their innocent ignorance, I spent two hours mopping up what might have been the foulest smelling water I have ever experienced and waited for a plumber to unclog our neighbor's toilet when I would have rather been sleeping.

That has been a revelation for me. The biggest challenge of living in the hutong has not been the house itself, the location, or those pesky mahjong games. Nope, the biggest challenge has been other foreigners who really do not have a clue about what they should and should not flush down a hutong toilet. You live and learn, don't you?

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.