June 12, 2025 • 13 mins
Mandy took some time out of her Mandy Connell Adventure overseas in South Korea & Japan to check in with Ross!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am your guest host for a very abbreviated version
of the show.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
My name is Ross.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
I am here because Mandy's preferred guest host, Randy Cromwell
is off having an emergency colonoscopy. He had to dig
deep at the last minute for someone who could just
get through it, and she had to settle for me.
What for those of you who are expecting a much
better show than I could give you, I am so
(00:27):
pleased to bring you the big Kahuna herself, Mandy Connell.
Mandy is in a land far away, in a day
and time unknown to both me and her.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Hi Mandy, Hello, Hello, Hello.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
We are currently sailing between Kagashima, where we were yesterday,
and Hiroshima, where we will be tomorrow. And today is
the first day of this cruise that it has not
been raining absolute.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Buckets all day long.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
The entire day we've done excursions and raining, pouring buckets,
and it's just been today. It's cloudy, but so far,
so good. There's no rain yet. And I did in
the gym this morning at five am actually see a
ball of fire in the sky as it as it
came above the ocean before it went behind the clouds,
so I know it's still out there, so maybe there's
(01:15):
hope we'll see.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
What were you doing in the gym at five am?
Speaker 4 (01:20):
I got to tell you this time change has been
brutal for me, absolutely brutal. I'm waking up at like
two thirty three in the morning, wide awake, like I
could do my show kind of wide awake. So I'm
trying to use my time constructively and went to the gym.
This I see Dragon there. Dragon's been every day. I
haven't been every day, but I see him every.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Day in the gym like a madman.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
So he's kind of shaming me into go into the
gym if I'm honest Ross, Otherwise I would still be laying.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
In bed right now. If I was like, damn it,
Dragon's going to be in the gym. I got to
get there.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Have you since you're since you're in Asia, have you
done any interesting Asian type classes.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Like large?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Like right now?
Speaker 4 (02:05):
On the ship there was there was an lecture on
the Samurai. It was showgun to Samurai, but I chose
to do a Tai cheek glass instead, which.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I think counts has aged an enrichment.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
You know, I feel like I'm doing the same kind
of thing, only out loud. But of course we've been
to several museums already and it's fascinating ross.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
They in the museums.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Yesterday we went to the Kamakazi Museum, which was so fascinating, right,
and they just kind of gloss over how that whole
World War two thing got started. They just don't mention it, right,
It's just like, here's what happened, here's these people, here's
what they did.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
But why were they doing it? We don't talk about that.
It's just kind of very you know, hush hush.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
But the Kamakazi Museum was incredibly sobering and you see
the pictures of these young men. The averaga age of
a Kamakazi pilot was twenty one, so in museum and
we couldn't take pictures in the museum. It's all very
highly personal stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
In that museum.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
You see the last will and testaments written by these
pilots the night before they got their final orders, right,
and when they say final orders, they mean final orders
like you're not coming back.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And you can read some of those.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
And the only way I can say it is there's
so much honor in the letters, and in the Last
Will and Testament a lot of them wrote to their
mothers to apologize for not being a better son. And
so I hope you're proud of me after I, you know,
take down a ship with five thousand of the enemy
on it, and it's it's such an honor based system
that it's kind of hard to be mad about it,
(03:41):
you know, and you understand why they did what they did.
But talk about the futility of war, I mean that
it's between this and seeing the.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Destruction in Nagasaki. It's it's it's it's it's a very
I'm glad we're doing all of that stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
That man, it really makes you a pacifist in a
way that you you know.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I wasn't before.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
It's I don't love war by any stretch of the imagination,
but this makes you go.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Man, we got to get this under control. You know.
It's just the devastation has been so complete.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Not to make light of it, but your comments remind
me of one of my favorite lines from the movie
Spinal Tap, where.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
The two main dudes are at Elvis's grave and.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
One of them says, it kind of puts things in,
puts things in perspective, doesn't it you know what the
other one says, what he says, too much effing perspective.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of how I felt yesterday
by the time we did the Comic Cozing Museum, and
then we went to a show excuse me, a Samurai
village with all these little Japanese gardens, and it was
beautiful in the pouring rain where everything has been in
the pouring rain. But it's a beautiful country, you know,
it's lovely, and God knows it's green because of all
(04:53):
the rain. So it's been a really good experience to
just sort of dip our toes into some of these places.
And I'm super excited about Kyoto because we have two
days in Kyoto because there's so much the sea in
Kyoto it's not even funny, and I'm really looking forward
to that. But tomorrow we do the last, hopefully of
the war memorials, because they're a little bit exhausting, and oddly,
(05:14):
I don't feel guilty.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That's the thing. I was like, am I going to
feel guilty?
Speaker 4 (05:17):
But then I'm like, no, they kind of started it,
so I don't feel bad about it, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
All Right, one more one more Japan question, and then
I want to go to what you were doing the
previous days.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You said you're going to Hiroshima.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
For some reason, I didn't realize that Hiroshima is on
the water. Is it on the water or do you
get somewhere and drive inland.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I don't think it's right on the water.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
A lot of these ports here are not the you know,
the stuff that we're going to see. You have to
drive inland for like twenty twenty five minutes or maybe
a little longer. But it's in a bay. It's in
this bay that we're currently in. Because Japan is just
a series of islands, right, I mean, it's it's not.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
One figuous country.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
There's there's a lot of different islands down from Okinawa
in the south up to the northern prefectures in the north,
So you just have these little chains of islands. Some
of them are bigger than others. And hiroshimas kind of
tucked into this bay that is in one of the
larger islands. So it's close to the coast, but not
like on the Atlantic and not on the China Sea,
(06:16):
if that makes sense. Kind to see on the western
side Pacific on the eastern side, so it kind of
has its own little bay that it is.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
A part of, but it's not on the major oceans.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
For those of you just tuning in, my name's Ross
and I'm sure you recognize the other voice because it's
her show, and that's Mandy Connell. And she is, as
I said, somewhere far away in some time zone that
even she doesn't know. But Mandy, a few days ago,
well you started your trip in Korea, and you started
the start of your trip going to the DMZ, and
(06:50):
I really need to hear.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
About this Ross fascinating.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
First of all, instead of doing like a scheduled tour
when we travel, we use a company called Tour to
schedule tours for us.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
You know, we joined along with other tours, so they
didn't have a tour that we wanted.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Because my husband had been stationed at Camp Casey and
he wanted to go to Camp case So he called
by a tour and said, look, can you put together
a private tour for us that we can go on
that allows us to go to Camp Casey. So they
hooked us up with a guy who is he used
to be at Catusa and Catusa's are Korean soldiers that
are attached to the US Army, So I didn't know
(07:27):
this until we got here. But the Catuosas are like
the rich people's kids, so they get like the plumb assignments.
They don't have to go live in the miserable barracks.
They get to hang out with the US Army. But
he was a catusa, so he gave us a tour.
We went to the official tourist DMZ area.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
South Korea has built a whole tourist attraction on the.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
DMZ, not on the DMZ but close to it so
you can see it. And while we were there ross
they were playing Rocketman on the loudspeakers and I could
not stop laughing.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
I mean, it was the funniest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
But then he took us from there to a rock
Republic of Korea Army guard post where we were literally
on the DMZ so we could see below us the
barbed wire. There was a lot a row of barbed
wire that was the South Korean side. Then there was
a row of barbed wire right in the middle that
was the actual they called the DML, which is the
(08:22):
actual line between the two countries and there's supposed to
be four kilometers between South Korea and North Korea, but
the North Koreans have a tendency to in the middle
of the night go build something in the actual DMZ
and they call it the line creep. So where we
were incipitating four kilometers apart, it was more like three
(08:44):
kilometers apart from the guard post.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
I was in to the guard post.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
I could see across the valley from where we were,
and I was looking at binoculars and I said, do
you think he's over there looking at the binoculars at me?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
And they said, absolutely they are.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
And then you could hear this noise and I couldn't
figure out what it was, and I said, what is
that noise? It sounded like in old style cars when
you would turn the radio dial and you'd give a
who that noise That's what it sounded like.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Well, North Korea doesn't like that.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
There are South Korean organizations that broadcast propaganda into North Korea.
So twenty four hours a day, three kilometers away, they
play this noise. And they have this massive speaker bank
right next to the guard post, and I could hear
it three kilometers away. You can only imagine what it
was like in that guard post on the North Korean side.
(09:34):
So we had a great conversation with one of the
rock soldiers just about working on the DMZ and how
in the early two thousands, the president of South Korea
tried to sort of normalize things with the North Koreans
a little bit, and it was going well. They built
this huge industrial park in North Korea for the North
Koreans to work in. There's all these factories right across
(09:56):
the border, and then Kim yung un fired a nuclear
and South Korea said, sorry, we're done with you, pulled everything,
all the resources out, so they're kind of back to
the stalemate that they've been in for a long time.
It was incredibly, incredibly interesting, really really cool.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
I'm very very glad we did that.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
I've heard that there are some tunnels involved with all this.
Did you see them? Did you hear about them?
Speaker 4 (10:19):
We saw The first tunnel they discovered was like in
nineteen seventy four, seventy three or early seventies, I don't
remember the exact date, but we could see the mouth
of that tunnel and from where we were in the guardpost,
so that was the first tunnel. There's a total of
five tunnels that they've discovered, the last one fairly recently
that they discovered the tunnels coming from North Korea, so
(10:39):
now they don't know if they found them all.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
There could be more. But it's fascinating because the whole
area has so.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
Many landlines in it now that you'd have to be
insane to you know, walk through any of that. So
the fact that those tunnels are there and perhaps we're
being used until fairly recently.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
It is pretty remarkable because I wouldn't walk in there.
There's signed everywhere. It's like, no, thank you, I'm good.
I'm not gonna do that.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
How's Korean food or how did Corean Food treat you?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I just it's my favorite food me too.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
It's my favorite cuisine by far. It was outstanding. Everything
we ate was delicious. On the day of our tour,
we stopped at a mom and pop, you know, restaurant
that had six things on the menu, and we ate
our six things, and I asked our Korean guide, I
was like, whatever, just order some food and then don't
tell me what it is until.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
After I eat it.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
So I did have spicy pork with a chunky snail
sauce rob or or Ross that was actually remarkably delicious.
I'm glad I didn't know what it was before I
ate it because it didn't look that appealing.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
But I was like when in Rome, right, I'm gonna
I'm gonna eat the food. It was outstanding. But it's
just the food has been great.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
And can I just say a moment about celebrity cruise lines, Dude,
I feel like a pretty pretty princess on this ship.
Before we could even ask for something, I think to myself,
I'd like some chocolate, and somebody shows up at the tree,
would you like some chocolate? It's unbelievable the service we've got.
And this is a smaller ship, so you get just
this like next, it's this trip is other than The
rain has been amazing, but everybody's kind of muscled through
(12:16):
the rain. We all wear raincoats and we're still going
to do the things.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
And it just means there's no other crowds.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
There for us to fight against because all the smart
Koreans are Japanese just stayed home on those days.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
How many listeners are with you?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I think we've like forty five.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
We had a few drop off for different reasons right
at the last minute. But we have forty five and
we've traveled with a lot of these people before. Super
good group of people as always. I'm sure your listeners
are the same way. We have some of your travelers
with us too, So just really phenomenal people and we're
having a great time. And everybody should come on these
(12:52):
trips at some point because they're just that good.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
That's Mandy Connell sunning herself, or she would be if
there were any sun on a celebrity cruise boat in
Japan heading to hiroshiam on what sounds like an absolutely
fabulous trip, have a wonderful time.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Thanks for doing this with us.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I'm sure your listeners are very glad to hear you
kind of in the interim here they get their dose
of Mandy.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
And I've been posting a ton of pictures on Instagram
at the Mandy Connell and I'm trying to I'm not
as good on Facebook, but I've been trying to like
basically duplicate to Facebook. But some of the pictures I
think gorgeous. I take great landscape photos. I take terrible
pictures of people, but I take great landscape photos. If
you want to see any of the stuff that we're
(13:36):
talking about. Just following me on Insta at the Mandy Connell.
That's the best way to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
There you go, Safe travels my friend, and thanks for
doing this.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Don't break the show.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I'll do my best to not ruin it.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
All right, man, I'll talk to you later, all right.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Thank you,
I am your guest host for a very abbreviated version
of the show.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
My name is Ross.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
I am here because Mandy's preferred guest host, Randy Cromwell
is off having an emergency colonoscopy. He had to dig
deep at the last minute for someone who could just
get through it, and she had to settle for me.
What for those of you who are expecting a much
better show than I could give you, I am so
(00:27):
pleased to bring you the big Kahuna herself, Mandy Connell.
Mandy is in a land far away, in a day
and time unknown to both me and her.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Hi Mandy, Hello, Hello, Hello.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
We are currently sailing between Kagashima, where we were yesterday,
and Hiroshima, where we will be tomorrow. And today is
the first day of this cruise that it has not
been raining absolute.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Buckets all day long.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
The entire day we've done excursions and raining, pouring buckets,
and it's just been today. It's cloudy, but so far,
so good. There's no rain yet. And I did in
the gym this morning at five am actually see a
ball of fire in the sky as it as it
came above the ocean before it went behind the clouds,
so I know it's still out there, so maybe there's
(01:15):
hope we'll see.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
What were you doing in the gym at five am?
Speaker 4 (01:20):
I got to tell you this time change has been
brutal for me, absolutely brutal. I'm waking up at like
two thirty three in the morning, wide awake, like I
could do my show kind of wide awake. So I'm
trying to use my time constructively and went to the gym.
This I see Dragon there. Dragon's been every day. I
haven't been every day, but I see him every.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Day in the gym like a madman.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
So he's kind of shaming me into go into the
gym if I'm honest Ross, Otherwise I would still be laying.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
In bed right now. If I was like, damn it,
Dragon's going to be in the gym. I got to
get there.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Have you since you're since you're in Asia, have you
done any interesting Asian type classes.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Like large?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Like right now?
Speaker 4 (02:05):
On the ship there was there was an lecture on
the Samurai. It was showgun to Samurai, but I chose
to do a Tai cheek glass instead, which.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I think counts has aged an enrichment.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
You know, I feel like I'm doing the same kind
of thing, only out loud. But of course we've been
to several museums already and it's fascinating ross.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
They in the museums.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Yesterday we went to the Kamakazi Museum, which was so fascinating, right,
and they just kind of gloss over how that whole
World War two thing got started. They just don't mention it, right,
It's just like, here's what happened, here's these people, here's
what they did.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
But why were they doing it? We don't talk about that.
It's just kind of very you know, hush hush.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
But the Kamakazi Museum was incredibly sobering and you see
the pictures of these young men. The averaga age of
a Kamakazi pilot was twenty one, so in museum and
we couldn't take pictures in the museum. It's all very
highly personal stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
In that museum.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
You see the last will and testaments written by these
pilots the night before they got their final orders, right,
and when they say final orders, they mean final orders
like you're not coming back.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And you can read some of those.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
And the only way I can say it is there's
so much honor in the letters, and in the Last
Will and Testament a lot of them wrote to their
mothers to apologize for not being a better son. And
so I hope you're proud of me after I, you know,
take down a ship with five thousand of the enemy
on it, and it's it's such an honor based system
that it's kind of hard to be mad about it,
(03:41):
you know, and you understand why they did what they did.
But talk about the futility of war, I mean that
it's between this and seeing the.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Destruction in Nagasaki. It's it's it's it's it's a very
I'm glad we're doing all of that stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
That man, it really makes you a pacifist in a
way that you you know.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I wasn't before.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
It's I don't love war by any stretch of the imagination,
but this makes you go.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Man, we got to get this under control. You know.
It's just the devastation has been so complete.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Not to make light of it, but your comments remind
me of one of my favorite lines from the movie
Spinal Tap, where.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
The two main dudes are at Elvis's grave and.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
One of them says, it kind of puts things in,
puts things in perspective, doesn't it you know what the
other one says, what he says, too much effing perspective.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of how I felt yesterday
by the time we did the Comic Cozing Museum, and
then we went to a show excuse me, a Samurai
village with all these little Japanese gardens, and it was
beautiful in the pouring rain where everything has been in
the pouring rain. But it's a beautiful country, you know,
it's lovely, and God knows it's green because of all
(04:53):
the rain. So it's been a really good experience to
just sort of dip our toes into some of these places.
And I'm super excited about Kyoto because we have two
days in Kyoto because there's so much the sea in
Kyoto it's not even funny, and I'm really looking forward
to that. But tomorrow we do the last, hopefully of
the war memorials, because they're a little bit exhausting, and oddly,
(05:14):
I don't feel guilty.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That's the thing. I was like, am I going to
feel guilty?
Speaker 4 (05:17):
But then I'm like, no, they kind of started it,
so I don't feel bad about it, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
All Right, one more one more Japan question, and then
I want to go to what you were doing the
previous days.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You said you're going to Hiroshima.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
For some reason, I didn't realize that Hiroshima is on
the water. Is it on the water or do you
get somewhere and drive inland.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I don't think it's right on the water.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
A lot of these ports here are not the you know,
the stuff that we're going to see. You have to
drive inland for like twenty twenty five minutes or maybe
a little longer. But it's in a bay. It's in
this bay that we're currently in. Because Japan is just
a series of islands, right, I mean, it's it's not.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
One figuous country.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
There's there's a lot of different islands down from Okinawa
in the south up to the northern prefectures in the north,
So you just have these little chains of islands. Some
of them are bigger than others. And hiroshimas kind of
tucked into this bay that is in one of the
larger islands. So it's close to the coast, but not
like on the Atlantic and not on the China Sea,
(06:16):
if that makes sense. Kind to see on the western
side Pacific on the eastern side, so it kind of
has its own little bay that it is.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
A part of, but it's not on the major oceans.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
For those of you just tuning in, my name's Ross
and I'm sure you recognize the other voice because it's
her show, and that's Mandy Connell. And she is, as
I said, somewhere far away in some time zone that
even she doesn't know. But Mandy, a few days ago,
well you started your trip in Korea, and you started
the start of your trip going to the DMZ, and
(06:50):
I really need to hear.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
About this Ross fascinating.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
First of all, instead of doing like a scheduled tour
when we travel, we use a company called Tour to
schedule tours for us.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
You know, we joined along with other tours, so they
didn't have a tour that we wanted.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Because my husband had been stationed at Camp Casey and
he wanted to go to Camp case So he called
by a tour and said, look, can you put together
a private tour for us that we can go on
that allows us to go to Camp Casey. So they
hooked us up with a guy who is he used
to be at Catusa and Catusa's are Korean soldiers that
are attached to the US Army, So I didn't know
(07:27):
this until we got here. But the Catuosas are like
the rich people's kids, so they get like the plumb assignments.
They don't have to go live in the miserable barracks.
They get to hang out with the US Army. But
he was a catusa, so he gave us a tour.
We went to the official tourist DMZ area.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
South Korea has built a whole tourist attraction on the.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
DMZ, not on the DMZ but close to it so
you can see it. And while we were there ross
they were playing Rocketman on the loudspeakers and I could
not stop laughing.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
I mean, it was the funniest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
But then he took us from there to a rock
Republic of Korea Army guard post where we were literally
on the DMZ so we could see below us the
barbed wire. There was a lot a row of barbed
wire that was the South Korean side. Then there was
a row of barbed wire right in the middle that
was the actual they called the DML, which is the
(08:22):
actual line between the two countries and there's supposed to
be four kilometers between South Korea and North Korea, but
the North Koreans have a tendency to in the middle
of the night go build something in the actual DMZ
and they call it the line creep. So where we
were incipitating four kilometers apart, it was more like three
(08:44):
kilometers apart from the guard post.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
I was in to the guard post.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
I could see across the valley from where we were,
and I was looking at binoculars and I said, do
you think he's over there looking at the binoculars at me?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
And they said, absolutely they are.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
And then you could hear this noise and I couldn't
figure out what it was, and I said, what is
that noise? It sounded like in old style cars when
you would turn the radio dial and you'd give a
who that noise That's what it sounded like.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Well, North Korea doesn't like that.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
There are South Korean organizations that broadcast propaganda into North Korea.
So twenty four hours a day, three kilometers away, they
play this noise. And they have this massive speaker bank
right next to the guard post, and I could hear
it three kilometers away. You can only imagine what it
was like in that guard post on the North Korean side.
(09:34):
So we had a great conversation with one of the
rock soldiers just about working on the DMZ and how
in the early two thousands, the president of South Korea
tried to sort of normalize things with the North Koreans
a little bit, and it was going well. They built
this huge industrial park in North Korea for the North
Koreans to work in. There's all these factories right across
(09:56):
the border, and then Kim yung un fired a nuclear
and South Korea said, sorry, we're done with you, pulled everything,
all the resources out, so they're kind of back to
the stalemate that they've been in for a long time.
It was incredibly, incredibly interesting, really really cool.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
I'm very very glad we did that.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
I've heard that there are some tunnels involved with all this.
Did you see them? Did you hear about them?
Speaker 4 (10:19):
We saw The first tunnel they discovered was like in
nineteen seventy four, seventy three or early seventies, I don't
remember the exact date, but we could see the mouth
of that tunnel and from where we were in the guardpost,
so that was the first tunnel. There's a total of
five tunnels that they've discovered, the last one fairly recently
that they discovered the tunnels coming from North Korea, so
(10:39):
now they don't know if they found them all.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
There could be more. But it's fascinating because the whole
area has so.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
Many landlines in it now that you'd have to be
insane to you know, walk through any of that. So
the fact that those tunnels are there and perhaps we're
being used until fairly recently.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
It is pretty remarkable because I wouldn't walk in there.
There's signed everywhere. It's like, no, thank you, I'm good.
I'm not gonna do that.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
How's Korean food or how did Corean Food treat you?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I just it's my favorite food me too.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
It's my favorite cuisine by far. It was outstanding. Everything
we ate was delicious. On the day of our tour,
we stopped at a mom and pop, you know, restaurant
that had six things on the menu, and we ate
our six things, and I asked our Korean guide, I
was like, whatever, just order some food and then don't
tell me what it is until.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
After I eat it.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
So I did have spicy pork with a chunky snail
sauce rob or or Ross that was actually remarkably delicious.
I'm glad I didn't know what it was before I
ate it because it didn't look that appealing.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
But I was like when in Rome, right, I'm gonna
I'm gonna eat the food. It was outstanding. But it's
just the food has been great.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
And can I just say a moment about celebrity cruise lines, Dude,
I feel like a pretty pretty princess on this ship.
Before we could even ask for something, I think to myself,
I'd like some chocolate, and somebody shows up at the tree,
would you like some chocolate? It's unbelievable the service we've got.
And this is a smaller ship, so you get just
this like next, it's this trip is other than The
rain has been amazing, but everybody's kind of muscled through
(12:16):
the rain. We all wear raincoats and we're still going
to do the things.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
And it just means there's no other crowds.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
There for us to fight against because all the smart
Koreans are Japanese just stayed home on those days.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
How many listeners are with you?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I think we've like forty five.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
We had a few drop off for different reasons right
at the last minute. But we have forty five and
we've traveled with a lot of these people before. Super
good group of people as always. I'm sure your listeners
are the same way. We have some of your travelers
with us too, So just really phenomenal people and we're
having a great time. And everybody should come on these
(12:52):
trips at some point because they're just that good.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
That's Mandy Connell sunning herself, or she would be if
there were any sun on a celebrity cruise boat in
Japan heading to hiroshiam on what sounds like an absolutely
fabulous trip, have a wonderful time.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Thanks for doing this with us.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I'm sure your listeners are very glad to hear you
kind of in the interim here they get their dose
of Mandy.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
And I've been posting a ton of pictures on Instagram
at the Mandy Connell and I'm trying to I'm not
as good on Facebook, but I've been trying to like
basically duplicate to Facebook. But some of the pictures I
think gorgeous. I take great landscape photos. I take terrible
pictures of people, but I take great landscape photos. If
you want to see any of the stuff that we're
(13:36):
talking about. Just following me on Insta at the Mandy Connell.
That's the best way to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
There you go, Safe travels my friend, and thanks for
doing this.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Don't break the show.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I'll do my best to not ruin it.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
All right, man, I'll talk to you later, all right.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Thank you,
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