frozen octopus

I received a Apple Gift Card from work for Thanksgiving which was a cool surprise. I used it to get four apps I've had my eye on lately. Very fun to mess around with over the long weekend.

1. MusicBox: An app that is basically a listen later list for music. You can tag albums and it has built in Shazam support which are both handy.
2. Stop Motion Studio: An app for making stop motion videos that I am going to use for flyers and videos.
3. When Did I?: A reminder app but in reverse but telling you when you last did something.
4. Logger for Shortcuts: A console type app for debugging Apple Shortcuts. Cool for the really long Rube Goldberg-esque shortcuts I make sometimes.

I met some friends in Asakusa and we went souvenir shopping for them. We kept seeing people walking around with Kumade (lucky rake). After no luck finding where they were sold, I asked someone holding one where they got it. Turns out it was from a temple called Otori about 10 minutes walk from where we were.

We took sort of a back way to get there and found a ton of street food and shichimi stands. They got shichimi to take back friends and we got to the back of the temple.

It was amazing. There were endless stands set up to sell the elaborate rakes. It was like you were in a glittering tunnel of rakes. The din of the people selling was incredible too. Every time they sold a bigger one, they'd do a chant for the buyer.

My friend got one and then they got some beer to celebrate. Totally fun. Then we went out to look at the front and realized there was a line blocks long to get in. We'd skipped maybe two hours wait unintentionally by going in the back way like total amateurs.