Beef and Garlic adventures!

Greetings and salutations! Tim, Katie, Juliann and I set off for the wilds of Takko for the Beef and Garlic festival last Sunday. Here's the deal: you bring some food & cooking utensils (we picked up some 'shrooms and yakisoba) then head down to Takko-machi. Grab a grill, buy some of the beef and garlic available and toss it on.

You can tell they were expecting a good turn out from the base... heh heh heh

Stoke that fire!

Freshly scraped grill greased to perfection with faaaaaat.

Juliann, Katie and Tim hard at work

*drools*

My expertly diced garlic... the chunks got bigger and bigger as I wanted to spend less time on prep work and more time on stuffing my face!

I got to try rotisserie beef. I wish we'd gotten there early enough to get a photo of the side of beef spinning on the spit. Holy smokes, melt in your mouth has a whole new meaning. If you ever ever EVER get the chance to come and taste that, do yourself a favor. 

After stuffing our faces we decided to take in the rest of the sights at the festival and try and burn off a few beef related calories. There were some booths selling various garlic related sundries. I picked this up for myself:

I look forward to making my delicious honey garlic chicken with this...

There were all sorts of cooking oils and garlic shaped memorabilia. There was a garlic queen or something or other that we were too busy cooking to really pay attention to. I know that Takko has a sister city of Gilroy, California, so there were lots of folks from the Misawa Military base who were down for the festivities. There was also a garlic spitting contest, but we were busy contending with our bloated bellies to watch that.

Once we'd felt we'd seen all there was to see, we set off for the near by historical village that Katie spotted on the way up to the B&G fest.

This cheery fellow greeted us upon entry to the village

Various types of old phonographs, how could I resist...

It took all sorts of self-control to keep from building a fire in that pit... 

Check out that thatching!

Thatch-roofed cottageeeees!

I'm not sure if that dawg was put there to repair a hole or just look cute... doing a swell job either way.

Well hung straw dolls...

There were some old stilts for us to try out (or just left carelessly out where anyone could play with them), I managed to do not a terrible job on them. A couple of the buildings were set up so you could make food, presumably in a traditional fashion, and there was also a wood chopping area, or someone just forgot to put the ax away... the jury is still out... and the wood was pretty wet so I did not do a very good job of chopping with the dull ax. That's right. Wet wood and a dull ax. Nothing to do with my skills at all.

Nestled in a valley, just below the Beef and Garlic festival

Pretty pretty pretty... Already October, but so few leaves have begun to change.

And what's a historical village without...

Classic cars and motorcycles! Weeeeeeeew!

I apologize for the misty quality of the car photos, I really should have used my actual camera and not just mah phone... still, it kinda adds a dream sequence quality to it... Faaaaancy.