In a word, it's filthy.  The buildings are filthy, with filthy windows and filth-covered rooftops.  The streets are paved with filth.  The air stinks of it.  All the world's scrubbing would not cleanse this place.  

And the smell of all this filth, it is between rotting meat and rotting defecation and rotting people - the gnats and horseflies are thousands thick, floating in the air or floating just above fresh horse waste.  And the smoke - the smoke of all the bars and opium houses, that too hovers in the air, and its scent is so overpowering that it must be a miracle these people remain on their feet, though no God of ours would bestow a miracle upon these people.  

Terraced establishments jostle each other for space; they are each so old and unstable that with every movement of every brawl inside, they give just a little bit, lean a little bit on another for strength.  Termites long ago hollowed the walls.  One couldn't have opened a lead-paned window without a shower of dust and termites onto the head of a random passerby below.  And then, those termites apparently hollow out the heads of that passerby, and soon enough you are left with a hoard of ignorant, unwashed, raucous, bawdy people with no taste other than that insatiable one for alcohol.  

And for flesh.  Inside every disintegrating building lounge whores, filthy whores who escaped the annoyance of children by getting boxed in the pregnant stomach during a nearby fistfight, or by doing it themselves.  Filthy whores with their heaving fleshy breasts and hips; and no one  to be their master, for any man in town could fill the duty so long as he knocks the other contenders to the ground.  

There is no quiet, there is no emptiness; every inch of the street, of the taverns, of the alleys, is filled, whether with vermin or people or garbage or mangy rabid hounds.  The din produced by them is unbearable - screeching laughter, a rumbling undertone of conversation, cat calls, glass shattering, men swearing, women crying.  Someone is pissing out some high-set window.

Little boys with gin pass the bottle around the group lurking atop a grimy shed; teenaged girls dress like the sluts, too much of their skin glowing in the night; some lucky person is vomiting uncontrollably in an alley, lying in it.  And the girls keep walking, the boys keep drinking, the whores keep laughing, and the men keep brawling behind golden-lit windows or shattered glass.  

When you said you wanted a life in the city, this wasn't what you envisioned, was it?