"Ebola no dae," they would declare, in the local krio language.
IT WAS 34 years ago that Park Geun-hye left Cheong wa Dae (the "Blue House"), South Korea's presidential mansion.
President Ernest Bai Koroma is bidding for re-election with snappy slogans such as "When Music is Nice We Play it Twice" and "De Pa Dae Woke", which means "The Father is Working".Whoever wins, the ballot creates opportunities for businessmen such as Mohamed Taleb, a recent immigrant from Lebanon.
But Sun Dae-in, the author of a recent book on Korea's housing market, says the deposits held by landlords must be seen as debts.
Park Dae-sung, a blogger who posted prophecies on the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crash of the won in 2008 under the pen name of Minerva, spent 104 days in prison for "spreading false rumours".Critics spy political interference.
A blogger, Park Dae-sung, was arrested in December after being rude about the government's economic management.
But, for the visitors, this is as much a part of their homeland as the South is, artificially isolated since the end of the second world war, though eventually, they are sure, all to be rejoined.Kim Dae Jung, the South's new president, seems keener than his predecessors to have a more open policy towards the North.
But social-networking technology seems to have had little influence on the British election: almost nobody took any notice of politicians' twitter feeds, etc.However, a recent blog by Dae Ryun Chang, at the Harvard Business Review's blog site, suggests that social networking had a marked influence on South Korea's recent local elections.
America and South Korea have been trying to disarm it for two decades, using a variety of approaches, but with little success.After power passed to the opposition in South Korea's 1997 elections, the new president, Kim Dae-jung, experimented with a "sunshine" policy, hoping that promises of peace and reconciliation, together with dollops of aid, would persuade the north to shed its hostility.
In his time, Kim Dae Jung alone has founded four of them: the Democratic Party, the New Democratic Party, the Party for Peace and Democracy, and the National Congress for New Politics (NCNP).
Even if President Kim Dae Jung turns out to be an ideal ruler (and only 18 months into his five-year term it is too soon to say), his successor could be a bad man or a foolish one.If the president were to devolve his power to the prime minister, other ministries and parliament, it would establish the idea that kings of any kind are no longer omnipotent.
