We booked our overnight stay at the gorgeous Malmaison at The Mail Box. We’ve stayed here a few times and have never been disappointed! Malmaison is the former Royal Mail building and is imposing and gorgeous from the outside. Situated right next to the equally gorgeous, The Mail Box. The rooms are genuinely really big with all the additions you would expect, Coffee facilities always being top of my list! Just going to put this out there…theres a Starbucks in reception!

We booked our stay at Malmaison through LastMinute.com – top tip here, if you also have a Quidco account, click through to last minute.com through there and you can potentially earn cash back. If you’ve never used Quidco before I would highly recommend it. I’ve made over £100 in cash back this year through changing energy providers and making sure I clicked through Quidco when I purchased Christmas presents.

Our room at Malmaison cost £123 for a Saturday night stay bed and continental breakfast. It’s worth mentioning here that the hotel also have some amazing £99 room deals on at the moment and loads of ‘date night’ offers. We didn’t use those these time as it was a late booking but definitely check out their “offers’ page here to see the bundle deals they offer which include champagne etc.

We arrived at 2pm and our room was ready which was a bonus, great service as always.

You can get the train to Birmingham’s New Street or Moor Street stations easily with just a short walk to the hotel, however, we decided to drive as we were making a slight de-tour on the way home. Parking is attached to the hotel in The Mail Box Car Park. It cost £17 for 24 hours parking this includes a 15% discount if you stay at the hotel.

  

After we dropped our bags off we headed into the Mailbox for a wander and to find some lunch, this weekend was their jazz festival and there were all sorts of music from a jazz bar outside on the canal to a piano player inside playing to people sat relaxing on deck chairs. (again, sorry no pictures, I was too busy taking it all in.) We found lunch at Pennyblacks which is just along the canal and ate some bites from their tapas menu which were lovely.

After lunch we made our way through to The Bull Ring via Grand Central which is incredible! AND HAS A MAC STORE. On the way from Grand Central to The Bull Ring is the best walkway ever, it’s called ‘Link Street’ and it has THE MOST amazing pop-up stores, one selling neon lighting, one selling the most disgusting but amazing ice creams surrounded by candy floss from Rebus and another selling ice creams made to order on a cold plate from Lo and BeCold. The only way I can describe this is a crepe style metal plate only freezing where they create the most incredible ice creams rolled up and into a pot.

Another incredible shop here is The Cereal Killer Cafe! This place is every 90’s teenagers dream! Every cool cereal you can imagine sold within the funkiest surroundings, you sit on a bed with a 90’s duvet cover and eat cereal and chat to your mates. Beyond Excited! Here’s some of the pics I took…

 

I love something different and this small tucked away gem was everything we were looking for in a Saturday afternoon, alcohol and movies! I booked our tickets to see Baby Driver online for £4 each + £1 booking fee. £9 for two cinema tickets! Great value and two fingers up to Vue who want £22 for the same in their cinema. There’s always something about going independent for anything anyway isn’t there so it feels great to be able to shout about this lovely venue. Plus you can take your wine & food inside with you. The small cinema seats 100 and can also be hired out (**gets notebook out to plan charity night**) The only thing I would say is that the toilets could do with some attention but the lady at the bar tells me they’re already investing in that area – I would have invested in some bleach really. Check out future listings and more info on The Mockingbird here.

When we came out of the movie (which by the way was absolutely brilliant! An absolute must watch), it was raining so we got an Uber to Temple Street’s The Botanist. I’d already to been to the Manchester botanist so knew Birmingham’s would be just as good, incredible cocktails served in gorgeous surrounding (with nice toilets, can you tell I’m OCD?) Perfect! I had a Porn Star Martini and he had something with Rum from a teapot, it was hilarious!

 Just a two minute walk from The Botanist is The Alchemist on Colmore Row… you can see a pattern emerging here.. COCKTAILS

We waited quite a while to be served here, much longer than the previous bar but it was a Saturday night, and the creations are astounding! Much more of a visual experience at The Alchemist with bunson burners and smoke filled canisters, if you’re looking for the wow factor, this is it! I can’t actually remember what I drank here, thats a good sign I guess haha, but it was smoking and looked like something from a chemistry lesson so I was happy!

Following our boozy cocktails we thought we had better actually eat something to soak up the alcohol, so another Uber ride away we went back to The Mailbox and headed to Rodizio Rico. Rodizio Rico is a Brazillian Churrascaria (easy for you to say) – basically what that means is, people walking round your tables offering you freshly cooked meat from skewers, every grilled meat you can imagine from chicken wings, to sausages to steak. If your partner is 6ft 5 like mine and can eat enough meat for 40 people this is the place for you. There’s a salad bar and plenty of options for vegetarians too. AND they sell buckets of Corona (see the pic below.. have a ever been more happy?)

 

 So there we are, after a nightcap back at Malmaison our 24 hours care -free was over. I am now knee deep in the week’s washing basket and haven’t done the big shop yet. Wish me luck!

Our Uber rides cost less than £10 for two journeys! Bargain – You can download the Uber App here and you can use my referral code for free rides – nicholaf87ue

If you’ve found this post interesting we would love to hear from you, especially if you use any of our recommendations! Let us know how you get on in the comments below! Next time I promise, I’ll take my camera! Nikki xx