Stop Ciovo

Apgujeong-dong (압구정동) district is considered as a Korean Beverly Hills. In fact, in this area there are a lot of luxury department stores (even if there's something you won't find...), boutique and design stores, very prestigious restaurants and pub and the Korea's Rodeo Street which is famous for korean celebrities hunting. There are also many clinics for cosmetic and plastic surgery. Anyway it's one of the world's most expensive shopping locations, more than Via Montenapoleone in Milan in Italy for example.

At night in Kim Sung Ryong's house he showed us some books he studied. Before becoming a professional when he was 14, he studied a lot of famous japanese player's games, from Honinbo Shuwa (本因坊秀和), Honinbo Shuei (本因坊秀栄) to Sakata Eio (坂田 栄男). The books he has are precious and rare, taken directly from Japan, and their value is thousands dollars. Every book contains from 200 to 300 games record, and in order to improve he replayed all the games and he used to finish a book in tree days!

We visited it Thursday during the evening, it's situated close to the subway Wangsimni Station. A Jimjilbang, I already wrote about it, means "sauna room", and there are many in Seoul. With 7000₩ (about 4€) you can enter this structure with many floors, and there's everything inside: a gym with a lot of gym equipment, big room to rest, air-conditioned rooms with different temperatures (75°C, 58°C, 72°, -12°C), a pool and whirlpool baths with different temperatures (45°C, 42°C, 38°C, 18°C) both in korean and japanese style, and then other korean style sauna rooms at 88°C, finnish style at 82°C and stainless at 55°C. Other than all these, it's possibile to have a massage and skin cleaning (price is from 12000 to 40000₩), and of course have a haircut.
Unfortunately it was not possibile to take pictures, so the only chance left for you to find out all the secrets of this wonderful place is to go yourself, it's really worth visiting!

Together with Kim Sung Ryong, we visited a go school (baduk dojang) in Seoul during Thursday afternoon. Some kids were yeongusaeng, that are players studying to become professionals, other less strong. I played two game with a kid, the first one as black without komi and I lost because I let escape an invasion group, while I won the second one.