Weekend Away In Manchester

It feels like ages since I last posted! It has been over a week, but I have been doing a little bit of housekeeping over the past couple of days and I also had a weekend away over the bank holiday. I'm a Essex/London girl, so I was quite excited to visit Manchester. I've never been there before and I felt it was a good city to explore! Me and Alex have some friends who live up there now, so we did a little visiting and had a nice explore around too! There's loads I want to talk about, so I'm going to split it up into a couple of posts so they're easier to find :)

Manchester is a really interesting city, there are loads of places to eat and drink and because its actually pretty small you can walk everywhere! We had loads of great food, and I'll be sharing a few of those too! We were also lucky enough to catch the opening of Home. It brings together a gallery, theatre, cinema and lots of different events into one big.. well, home. Check out their website here. They had a street party to celebrate the opening and it was a lot of fun!

This band certainly helped! They wandered around playing music and generally having a very good time! There was always a crowd of people around them/a line of followers when they were on the move. They jazzed up well-known songs that gave the whole day that street party feeling. I took a short video too..

They also had a group of young adults (I feel patronising saying children! They were probably between 14-16) called Pantonic that played steelpans and they were awesome too! Unfortunately my picture was taken as we were leaving, but you can see the crowd they gathered.

We also visited the gallery which has some interesting exhibitions. They're all quite contemporary and it would definitely be worth a visit! The picture on the left showed my favourite exhibition, because it was so simple and also quite true! It was filled with sayings all about the current world we live in, lots of them were about technology and how much has taken over a lot of our lives. If you happen to be in Manchester, do check it out :)

I know this a little bit of a long post, so I'll leave you with a few pictures of our journey home. We visited another friend while we were in Manchester and he suggested driving home through the Peak District. Mainly because we could visit a place called Penistone (I did see the sign, Perry, but couldn't get a picture!) That aside, it was really pretty, very green! I can imagine it would be a lovely 'day out'. I took a few pictures as we were driving, so the quality isn't great! But here's a few to show you anyway :)

Please let me know if there is anywhere else in Manchester that anyone knows and would recommend, I'm sure to go back! And keep an eye out for my restaurant posts that I'll try and get up over the next couple of days :)