A driver with a car came just as I was about to check with the Korean travel firm, and off we set to Gunpo city, and to find where teacher Kim lived in the Sanbon district. The driver had to chat with someone driving a small van, and also to ring teacher Kim, before we arrived at the right tower block in a grove of tower blocks. Teacher Kim has a large two storey apartment at the top of one of these tower blocks which he uses to put up the foreign students who attend his Baduk academy BIBA. I luckily had a room to myself as the student whose room it was studies in Seoul during the week.

It’s a short walk from the apartment to the BIBA, it was only by the last day of my stay that I knew the twists and turns to take! One does self study at BIBA before 2pm when the teachers arrive, I had a kind of breakfast / lunch at a chain called Paris Baguette of some pastries and green tea (found the iced green tea best as the hot tea was too hot in the already hot weather in Sanbon - glad I wasn’t there in summer when temperatures are in the high thirties). There were multiple Paris Baguette stores in Sanbon just as there were multiple 7-11s, less than a hundred yards apart! English is less established in Sanbon than Seoul but I managed as necessary by pointing. There seemed to be eateries and shops everywhere you looked in Sanbon, many quite upmarket like the cake shops.

BIBA mainly teaches youngsters, both boys and girls. The stronger students don’t attend normal school at all, but study Baduk all the time. I was very puzzled by this coming from the UK where this wouldn’t be allowed - it is a problem for those who don’t make the professional grade. At the apartment but also at BIBA one takes one’s shoes off, at BIBA there is a supply of slippers at the door.

I played several games at BIBA, usually losing by miles. It’s salutary playing a young kid, getting obliterated, and then him telling you how badly one played. I also studied opening positions, and got some way through a set of tsume-go problems. It was quite hot inside BIBA, I sometimes would go out for fresh air and once had an iced blue coloured lemonade drink. A treat watching them halve a real lemon, squeeze it into a plastic cup, add blue colouring, then put into a machine which chilled it and sealed it, then pierce the top with a thick straw.

I ate out on the nights in Sanbon with people from BIBA, very sociable. The first night was at a barbecue place where you cook the food yourselves using a grill in the table. The heat from the coals under the grill made me feel unwell. Following Korean tradition the youngest person does the cooking, as we were using chopsticks there was a pair of scissors provided to cut the meat. The second night three of us went to a Korean flavoured Japanese restaurant, but later on that evening a larger group of us went to a ‘pub’ with loud music and packing crate decor where we had pineapple flavoured soju. The third night the same three of us went to another barbecue cook it yourself place (called Dino Meat) where we sat on the floor, and you could press buzzers on the tables to call the waitresses. We being there amused the staff a lot.

We would then return to the apartment around 10pm - even at that time you would see children in school uniform. A lot of long suffering children have to go to cram schools, there was one next door to BIBA. The last night I was there Teacher Kim cooked some very hot noodles, I could just about eat them but my lips burned for a while afterwards. His family were watching the Korean TV drama “Entertainer” on a very large TV.