Today, after a nap and a lazy lap in the pool, I front up to the Chinese hairdresser who mans a tiny salon called the Happy Chinese Hair House. Or, at least, I bang on his street window till he wakes up from his nap under the hot dryer and ask if he would possibly have the time for a cut and colour today.

Oooh, he says. Vely busy. Vely busy today. Swiping a cockroach off his appointment book, he yells out back to where his assistant is liberally applying somnolent drool to a stack of Chinese magazines, and graciously invites me in.

I spend the next three hours being treated to such delights as having my hair washed in a bucket with what looked suspiciously like dishwashing detergent and foils applied using strips of yellowed newspaper that might have been current in the pre-Mao years.

Eventually, I am charged something that would have been considered inflated in Europe, and ushered out the door with a bracing “You, no swim. Pool. Turn hair green.”

I stand roadside trying to hail a taxi but for the most part they slow enough either to realise I’m unlikely to speak Cantonese or to admire the monstrosity that has recently been afflicted hair-wise, and then speed away.

Happily, though, on the long and dusty walk home I stumble across an odd building downtown which is set up like an old apartment block but has shops in every room. Western-style clothes for a quarter of the price, if that – heaven in communist housing. It seems that many such shops are tucked away in buildings like this because the bigger markets are being shut down by the government.