Cherry Blossoms and Plesiosaurs

A trip to Jinhae this weekend (April 7th-8th)  on the RoK's southern coast, revealed a big white explosion of Spring.  Jinhae is the cherry blossom capital of South Korea, and as you'll see from the pictures, it didn't disappoint.

Cherry blossom blooming tends to be quite regular each year here in East Asia, and the beginning of the season can usually be predicted down to within a few days.  In both Japan and Korea, the blossoms generally bloom first at the most southern areas of the country (there are exceptions in the case of micro-climates), and then sweep up through the country over a period of weeks.  In Japan this is called the sakura zensen (桜前線) or "cherry blossom front."

Cherry blossoms are always the surest sign that spring has come to the land once again.  It was a weekend of warm weather and flawless blue skies.  As usual there was nary a downtrodden face to be seen beneath this part of the world's most beautiful, yet fleeting, confirmation of new life and the passage of the seasons.

A street lamp casts ghostly illumination in the night.

This is what the view is like from restaurants in Jinhae during the season.

If dolphins are so smart, why do they keep beaching themselves on platters?  

As with any festival there was also a lot of food to be sold and consumed.  Something about the mammalian dorsal fin sticking out of this one caught my eye.

Actually, I'm not sure that the pile of meat that was sticking out of was actually dolphin, as this sign was right below:

 I think the overall message of the display was "eat something that produces a rudimentary language."  For the record, I opt not to eat whale or dolphin when the (very rare) occasion arises.

We also went to the Jinhae naval base (Jinhae is big on their Navy), walking distance from downtown.  At the dock there we could board a recreation of what is known as the "Turtle Ship."  The original was made by Admiral Yi Sun-Shin in 1591 and was the spearhead of the Korean Navy at the time.  At the time of its building Yi Sun-Shin was the commander of one of the four fleets located in the Korean South Sea.  It was propelled by 16 oars, had 14 cannons and carried a 130 crew members.

If you've read this far you're probably wondering why the word plesiosaur is in the title.  Well if you were thinking that it must have been just a catchy hook to make you read the post, then I ask you just what in the hell THIS is:

That... is a plesiosaur.

I was so into cryptids when I was a kid (make that still--I'm a sucker for those headlining four second videos of craptacular, blurry footage that looks like it was being filmed by someone with a one megapixel camera on zoom while suffering an epileptic seizure) so when I saw this 19th century naval flag the first thing I exclaimed was "Why does that dragon have four distinct FLIPPERS?!" to which my girlfriend looked at me blankly and shrugged, probably wondering why she had thought I'd be able to handle a museum.

The first inkling people had of plesiosaurs was after fossils, including a partial skeleton, were found in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, the first in Nottinghamshire in 1719.  Sure, the earliest of those finds predated this flag a bit, but how likely is it that the flag designers, from a country historically nicknamed the "Hermit Kingdom," had seen a fully reconstructed plesiosaur fossil by the 1800s (and liked it enough to dragonify it and put it on a flag)?

Okay, okay, this is all totally far fetched, but can you say that your imagination is not tantalized (A little? Just a tiny bit?  No?) by the idea that early Koreans had at some point seen or caught a plesiosaur and been impressed by its fearsome morphology so much as to pass down its likeness over time and eventually use it to symbolize naval strength?  The idea is only (and that's a pretty subjective "only") as ridiculous as the commonly held idea that "Champ" of Lake Champlain, "Ogopogo" of lake Okanagan, or Nessie herself are somehow extremely late (and inexplicably) surviving aquatic reptiles, with as yet no hard evidence of their existence.  That said, if these things want me to believe in them then they better start getting caught up in the nets of deep sea trawlers soon like any self-respecting shark, loggerhead turtle or woefully endangered species.

As a final thing to mention, I was so obsessed with the purported monster of Lake Champlain when I was six or seven (I'll always love you, Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack) that my parents eventually took the family on a long summer trip with a foray into the States whose climax, for me, was visiting the lake and taking a ferry across it.  I don't remember everything from that trip, but I recall standing at the railing of the ferry, staring out over the water for the entire ride, and then being incredibly disappointed that I didn't get the eerie glimpse of saurian I'd hoped for.  I guess that kind of mentality is still with me, and maybe always will be.  As Fox Mulder said, "I want to believe."  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that means tangible, conclusive evidence.  I know it's a coincidence that this peculiar dragon was drawn with four flipper like appendages, which could just as understandably have been inspired by oars, and ended up resembling a prehistoric creature extinct since the Cretaceous period.  Now if only my imagination would let me be.

So what do you think?