Rochdale Canal Festival

This year's Rochdale Canal Festival has, for the first time, been extended into Manchester city centre. The Rochdale Canal comes into Manchester just across the road from where we live, so we've been taking advantage of some of the things that have been organised as part of the festival. Best of all, it's all been free!

On Thursday evening we popped over to the car park on Ducie Street to watch a screening of the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic. The film was projected against the wall of a multi-storey car park and there were deckchairs available for people to sit and watch. You could also park your car up and tune into the audio for the film through your car's FM radio. We arrived a little later than planned so we had to make do with a bench.

I'm a big fan of The Life Aquatic but I hadn't seen it for a while. I quickly remembered why I'd liked it so much. It's funny without being completely daft, poignant at times without being too schmaltzy, and it has Jeff Goldblum and Bill Murray in it. What more could you want?

The amazing Malaysian restaurant Ning were also there, serving food from a little marquee. I had the Kuey Teow Goreng, which is a mix of chicken, beansprouts and thick noodles in a slightly spicy chilli sauce. Liz had the Chicken Lime Curry and we both shared some lamb samosas and vegetable spring rolls. Pretty tasty stuff. I think we're going to pop over to Ning at some point soon hopefully!

Also as part of the festival, artist Kerry Howarth has yarn bombed the Brewer Street Bridge over the canal. We saw her the day before busy tying all the bits of yarn to the railings as it was starting to rain. We think it looks great! Definitely worth all the hard work. It looks like extra bits are been added too, although it might just be us not noticing things the first time round.

LomoWall is a new permanent lomography exhibition on Tariff Street. It's made up of loads of photographs taken on lomography cameras and you can see a little bit of it in the photo underneath. If you click on the bit that says LomoWall back there <--- you can watch a video of it being put together.

It's not too late to go and have a look yourself! The LomoWall and the floating garden at Jackson's Wharf (Which we don't have a photo of!) are permanent and free, so you can go and see them any time you like. Also, I've just seen that there's a BBQ at New Islington Marina on Sunday, after moaning about not being able to eat barbecued food in the last post. There's loads of other stuff going on as well, between midday and 4pm. LOOK AT THIS FOR MORE INFO.

See yer.

S