I've always wanted to do a 'day in the life' kind of post but for one reason or another an exciting day with photo opportunities has never coincided with me having my camera on my person and also having the presence of mind to use it. However, yesterday I went to the cinema with my best friend to see Paper Towns, and we decided to combine it with a trip up one of Belgium's most famous landmarks - aka the Atomium.

We figured out that there were only a couple of cinemas still showing Paper Towns in Brussels, neither of which were the cinema we tend to frequent but we decided to make it a little adventure (which soon became a running joke, oh dear) to find our way there. In the end we had to take two trams and it took us over an hour to get there, but it was worth it as along the way we got to see parts of the city we don't usually see.

The movie itself was more or less what I expected. I read the book a while ago so I'd forgotten most of the plot, which is a testimony to the fact that it didn't particularly wow me, and I felt the same way about the film. It was one of those movies that I wanted to see more out of curiosity than anything else, but I've come to the conclusion that I much preferred it to The Fault in Our Stars, eesh. I was also interested to see Cara Delevingne's acting, which was really quite good in my humble opinion. All in all it was a lovely feel-good comedy/drama, which was actually quite funny in some places and extremely cringey in all the others.

Next we walked down the road to this fairly forbidding-looking structure, which I always think wouldn't look out of place in an adaptation of The War of the Worlds. The Atomium was built in 1958 for the Brussels World Fair (Expo 58), and the design is modelled after the structure of an iron crystal magnified several billion times. The name comes from a combination of atom and aluminium, which is what the round bits are made out of - look at all the facts I managed to retain! Each sphere has about three floors, but only a few of them are open to the public, including the top one which is a restaurant. I'd been inside the Atomium before, but I was probably only about five so I have only the vaguest memory of it.

The spheres are linked by a mixture of escalators and staircases, the latter sporting a rather vintage paint combination of red and turquoise.

On the way back down we realised it was in fact raining torrentially, which made for some pretty atmospheric shots.

The final escalator had this fancy lighting that flashed red and blue, very jazzy indeed and probably the bit I was most excited about.

After we left the Atomium (in the pouring rain I might add, we got absolutely soaked despite two umbrellas) we embarked on the long and tedious journey home. But it was well worth the trip!