President Mike Pence left shakes hands with South Korean President Moon Jae-in prior to their meeting at the presidential office Blue House in Seoul Thursday Feb. 8 2018
Before flying south, she said, she had expected "things would be very different and unfamiliar", according to a statement from Moon's office. Written by a senior editor, the piece began: "Some detractors of Moon Jae-in would call him and his supporters a bunch of commies and claim that they shouldn't be trusted to run the country".
"It is absolutely necessary for the North and the United States to engage in talks at an early date", he cited Moon as saying.
North Korea has no intention of meeting USA officials during the Winter Olympics that start in South Korea on Friday, state media said, dampening hopes the Games will help resolve a tense standoff over the North's nuclear weapons programme. Or its biggest loser.
President Moon hosted Kim at the presidential mansion for lunch on Saturday - a session in which Kim extended an invitation for Moon to visit North Korea later this year.
Such a high-level meeting would have been unthinkable even a few months ago, but 2018 has seen an accelerated rapprochement between the two adversaries in the run-up to the Games.
Such a meeting would be the first such event between a South Korean head of state and a member of the Kim family since a 2007 summit meeting of Kim Jong Il and late South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun.
On one side of the arena, about 75 North Korean cheerleaders dressed in matching red with white caps made noise from the opening faceoff. "They fled to seek freedom".
But what has really incensed opponents has been his decision to invite the regime to this week's Olympics.
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Koreas share historic handshake at Olympics opening led by Greek team
A high-ranking DPRK delegation arrived in South Korea by private jet earlier in the day to attend the opening ceremony. The two-week Winter Olympic games will kick off with the highly anticipated Opening Ceremony.
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As the North Korean squad chirped encouragement like "Unify the motherland!" and "Win, win, our athletes win!", the women from the south gyrated to pop music, exposing a cultural gap every bit as wide as the scoreline on the ice. Seoul wasted no time in making arrangements. The night before, Kim and other North Korean delegates attended the opening ceremony of the Olympics, watching a "unified" Korean team march under a banner showing an undivided Korean Peninsula.
South Korean Choi Yoon-seok, 21, had a hunch Kim would show up to Saturday's hockey game. For Lim Jin-gyu, an amateur singer and songwriter who lives in central Seoul, this created mixed feelings about the entire event.
Others are reluctant to see the North's participation as anything more than a clever attempt to hijack the Olympic limelight.
On Saturday Kim Yo Jong "courteously" handed over a personal letter from the North Korean leader to Moon and told him of her brother's "intention", North Korea's state news agency KCNA said, without elaborating what that was. "Only more pressure will work". Because in my opinion, they're pretty much the same people.
As the fans sang and bopped to the rhythms of rap, rock and pop played over stadium speakers, the North's cheerleaders countered with a North Korean pop song that was popular a decade ago, the last time the two Koreas were trying to make peace. The conservative South Korean Chosun newspaper observed: "Seoul voluntarily postponed holding joint military exercises with the United States during the Games".
"Our objective here today is to stand with our allies, but it's also to stand up for the truth, and to recognize that whatever images may emerge against the powerful backdrop and idealism of the Olympics, that North Korea has to accept change", Pence said. The North's political delegation was set to leave Sunday.
Tensions between the two soared a year ago as Pyongyang launched intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States mainland and carried out by far its most powerful nuclear test to date. -North Korean contact at the dinner, but U.S. Vice President Mike Pence refused to agree. As with any controversial leader, he said, it's easy to be cynical.
It is rare for the North's official media to refer to the South's leader as president, usually describing them as chief executive or similar, and even more unusual for a picture of them to be shown. A pair of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un impersonators cozily made the rounds, until the hubbub their appearance incited forced them to be escorted away by security.
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