If you’ve been following my tweets or updates during my staycation and like what you see, quick book your slot with the form below. (If you’re having problem loading the form on this post, its also accessible here.) Book a Qool Weekend staycation for your love one and yourself.

Promotion updated with even Qooler activities and even a lucky draw! Find out more after the video!

Updates!

On top of Yoga and Cupcake classes, Quincy have introduced Happy Feet – Learn Foot Massage! Also, Friday and Sunday check-in guests are now welcomed to join us for some fun as Quincy have opened up more available time slots for you.

Here are the available activities:
Friday Check-ins
Happy Feet – Learn Foot Massage! (9pm-10.30pm)
Cupcake Baking class (2.30pm-4pm, Saturday Afternoon)
Saturday Check-ins
Cupcake Baking class (4.30pm-6pm)
Movie Nights by/in pool (9pm)
Sunday Check-ins
Happy Feet – Learn Foot Massage! (3.30pm-5pm)
Movie Nights Nights by/in pool (9pm)

Prior registration is required and activities are subject to availability/a minimum group size. Interested guests are encouraged to confirm the activities availability from the hotel at +65 6738 5888.

There’s even an Exclusive Lucky Draw for Qool Weekend Guests!! 1 night stay = 1 entry. Increase your chances of winning by booking more nights at Quincy!

Weekly Draw

• Win a 6″ Cold Stone Ice Cream Cake worth $44 with 5 flavors to choose from!
• 1 winner each week. Check out Quincy Facebook Page for the results! First draw starts on 18th November 2011.

Overal Draw (4 winners)

• Top Prize : OCHRE Dining Voucher worth $200 (1 Winner)
• Runner Up: Orchard Central Vouchers worth $100 (3 Winners)
• Results will be announced on 10 February 2012 at our Facebook Page

With so many goodies, what are you waiting for?

Let me share why I love Quincy Hotel! (Purely my personal opinions)

Love #1 – The chic room, comfy King size bed and in-room amenities

King Size Bed with very comfy mattress and comforter

Complimentary Mini Bar! Just stretch out your hand anytime to grab a drink. Love it!

Everything in here are complimentary too! Lays chips I like!

This was the first that caught my eyes when I entered the room. Next time I should bring PS3 or DVDs to watch! Ultimate pig-out staycation!

Don't remember seeing complimentary copies of magazine in a hotel room before. This is the first! Nice touch Quincy!

Lovely shampoo and shower amenities in the toilet! From Molten Brown

Love #2 – Full board staycation

Buffet Breakfast included

Set Lunch included too!

Set lunch and dinner comes with free-flow salad, soup, drinks, juices, coffee, tea and biscuits for nibbles.

Set dinner! All three meals included in the package! How cool is that!

Set dinner thats filling and satisfying. It tastes better than it looks!

Besides three meals, there’s also free-flow coffee or tea and a free fall zone aka Ice cream with strawberry or chocolate sauce for topping! Love this! I had like three cups during my stay that weekend! Great chilling off in this hot weather.

Complimentary cocktail is also served daily from 6pm to 8pm at the restaurant. Think free flow beer, wine, liquor, mixer and more! Drink drank drunk anyone?

Love #3 – Hotel facilities and things we get to do

Lovely pool on the 12th floor. Floats are for Saturday's movie night use! Don't miss this unique experience while you're at the hotel!

Popcorn anyone? This I heard will be served every Saturday night for movie goers. And the chiller next to it, filled with drinks are complimentary too! Grab some and chill out by the pool with your favorite book or your iPad! Ultimate relaxation can?

The hotel gym is very well equipped and its accessible 24-hrs! This is only one side of it. More muscle toning machines on the other end!

Sweat it out in the sauna room

Or get a steam bath! Great for clearing off the stress from a day's work

There's lockers too on the 12th floor. Great for pre/post check-in guests.

There's also complimentary classes for weekend stay guests! Choose from Yoga (8am on Sat) or Baking (3pm on Sat). Booking is required as there's limited slot per session. Lovely idea for weekend staycation isn't it?

More photos from my stay…

I’m 50% recharged from this and already started working on my dying MBP in bed the moment I got home. Very unhealthy for me, but its like that lah. I’m a hazardous worker.

More on the getaway when I’ve time to get the photos out from my Canon S95. Do have some not so good review about the hotel we stayed at. :(

In short:

1. I loveeeee swimming in mineral pool! I want one in our house can?
2. Lion King rocks!!
3. PC Show at Suntec was crazy as usual! Better human traffic control though. Good job!
4. Didn’t get to eat buffet at Melt nor AquaMarine cos I can’t eat as much as I used to.
5. I want to do more of these short getaway, even if its in Singapore!

The crew behind Rediscover Singapore spent time brainstorming and conceptualising this video. And with their tight schedule, still able to produce one that touches hearts of Singaporean. Its not about winning the highest votes (a little hard since those who submitted earlier gets more time to rally for daily votes) nor winning the most creative video award.

Its really about sharing the things and reasons why we call this Home.

If you like this video, please help vote for it on thisishome.sg. You can vote everyday! 20 days to go before the contest closes. So go watch and vote if you can relate to it.

For the first time, I’m naming my new toy! Sol, my new Canon S95 will arrive in full glory next week. Shall wait patiently for his grand arrival.

My favorite shot taken that night when I fell in love with Sol’s twin brother.

Take a closer look.

Thanks Canon for hosting us that night.

The sound of the place already got me thinking how much the meal would cost. But it was a lunch date I cannot miss. Have not met this group of friends for more than 2 years? Though not everyone could make it that day, it was still great catching up! And not forgetting the pressure and stress they’d imparted in me! Wedding plans, selecting and queueing for house, the pain and how to fight all the way to milk as much as possible for the wedding banquet and at the bridal shop. Thanks ah!

Stepping into the hotel lobby already took my breathe away! I can’t remember when was the last time I stepped into such exquisite and posh looking hotel here in Singapore. NEVER I think. The high ceiling and luxurious furnitures and decor makes my Threadless Tee, Uniqlo Tights and Muji Bag look like a joke can! But *coughs* I wasn’t alone. If I’d the chance to, I would love to experience living there for a weekend staycation just to feel high-class for once. *coughs*

I got carried away! I haven’t started talking about the food! Guess the hotel made a bigger impact on me than the food I had for lunch!

Waterfront dining with view of the historic remain of the preserved Clifford Pier. Okay! This photo does no justice to the sight I had that afternoon! Bad control of lighting, my bad.

Roasted cod fish, saffron-chorizo risotto, parmesan emulsion, $36

I am a sinner tasting this. For more than 7 years, I’d avoided and left the meat untouched. With the lack of knowledge in the language, I failed to learn that chorizo is actually made from several types of pork sausages! Removed every single bits (even the slightest hairline of it) from the risotto. (Sorry Abang, I really didn’t know!)

If you do not have such problem like me, please go try this. It’s good.

The two items I would 100% order again if I return for another visit will be these…

Truffle French Fries, $9

Yes! I will pay $9 for this small serving of awesome fries! No! Not just any ordinary frech fries. Its filled with truffle goodness, and its the real stuff not just some truffle oil. These fries were crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside. These fries are to be savored slowly and please do not rush to finish them. The awesomeness stays the same even eaten after saving it till after the mains.

Dessert sample (for two), $28

Not sure which of the desserts to try, we checked what the sample consists of, and we gladly ordered two servings of the dessert sample since it’s of every one of their desserts! And its oh-so-divine! Great way to end the meal.

Starting from the most identifiable, we have the “Dark chocolate fondant”, “Passion fruit rum baba, mango tartar, yogurt sorbet”, “Sugar crusted profiteroles, hot chocolate sauce, vanilla ice cream”, “Creme brulee” and “Lemon tart, raspberry gel”. Each has its own goodness and we almost did the “ohhh-stand-turn-and-turn-and-turn-around” dance each time we tasted the dessert samples. My favorites were the Dark chocolate fondant, Sugar crusted profiteroles and creme brulee. I’m salivating just writing about it now!

If you’re feeling happy and in need to splurge and indulge in some yummy goodness, you can give Clifford a try. Great place for a afternoon tea with good friends or just a good book. I can so picture myself doing something like this when I retire. *chuckles*

Clifford
The Fullerton Bay Hotel
80 Collyer Quay
Tel: 6597 5288

I don’t recall seeing any dustbin around, not sure why. If there were bins around, I wonder if this will still happen.

Whole group of students were having some orientation or sort at the Esplanade underpass. And the mess was spotted at another corner. These may be left there by other group of people. No matter who did it, its still very ugly! Aren’t we supposed to be a clean and green city?

WAH!!! That’s a mouthful of names and jargon! But its damn cool riding inside the Terrex! I was told this is one of the latest model and equipped with cooling system to enhance the comfort of our infantry forces. The ride was smooth and not as uncomfortable as I’d thought.

For safety reasons, we had to put on the heavy helmet! I look so o.o in it lah! But safety first! Round and ugly, but still must camwhore for memory sake! Wahahahaha!

We did the route that the mobile column will be doing on National Day at the Padang. When we arrived at the Padang, we could hear the fanfare from inside the tank and boy the excitement was exhilarating! Imagine riding past the Padang on the actual day! (No I won’t be inside the Terrex come 9 Aug! I’ll be seated at the spectator stand watching the show! YEah!)

With me in the Terrex was James.

All these opportunities were made possible by the great, hardworking and pretty cute guy – Joel! He’s always working behind the scene and rarely spotted in the frontline. So I’m going to post his photo up here for all to see his cuteness (cuter in person though)! Wahahahahahaha! @eevonng and @molemole will surely agree with me! :P Presenting…. Joel…

Ending this short post with a video… preview of what to expect on August 9 at the heartland near you!

On 29 April, Diana and I took a day off and soaked ourselves wet (Yes! Wet!!) at the most exciting attractions to date in Singapore. We captured fun memories at Universal Studio Singapore with Canon digital cameras. Thanks to Canon of course!

Castle Far Far Away

On adventures like such, you wouldn’t want to carry big bulky DSLR with you right? So we were given the challenge to try out Canon latest cameras and the oh-so-fun new shooting modes! Personally I had more fun playing with these shooting modes than the rides at USS! (I’m serious!)

So what are the fun and new shooting modes I used? Check these photos out and you’ll be able to guess! Okay, no need to guess, its tag below the photos!

Fish-eye (Low) on Castle Far Far Away

Fish-eye (Med) on Castle Far Far Away

Fish-eye (High) on Castle Far Far Away

Can you see the differences in the above three photos taken with the new mode, Fish-eye Effect? On the latest Canon cameras, you’ll be able to capture such shots easily and you get to decide how much “fishy” of your photo by setting the intensity of the effect.

Next, this is one of my favorite! This one can get a little tricky, but if you have the right scene waiting for you to capture, its real cool! You see the photos first and I’ll tell you more after…

Do these look like miniature buildings to you?

And this! Looks like a model placable in your living room!

Cool right? I love it! This is the Miniature effect, new in the latest Canon digital cameras! This ultra cool effect is done by gradually blurring the top and bottom to emphasize perspective so as to make the main object in your shot stand out. Sounds complex right? But thanks to Canon technology, this is made possible with just press and turn of the button/dial! It works in both landscape and portrait mode. And you get to set how wide you want the emphasize area to be! So fun can! Abang saw my shots and he’s loving it! Hoho!! New camera to play soon? Hmm…

Besides testing these two new shooting mode, we revisited some of the existing ones too! Not my first time playing with it, but I’ve to admit, having owned quite a number of Canon digital cameras before, these modes were rarely used. But then, after that day at USS with Diana, I found a new and fun way for them!

Let me show you some magic!

This is us in our bright blue and green top that day…

Me and Babe Molemole!

I got tired of wearing my green t-shirt that day, so I decided to turn it blue like Molemole’s!

Ohhh… magic!! LOL!

And then, there’s this super cute yellow taxi along Hollywood so I decided to turn my t-shirt color to yellow too!

Waaaaa!! So cool right! It’s magic! LOL!

Hang on… I don’t like the yellow on me! Still prefers my original green! So let’s turn the taxi green! Ho! Ho! Ho!

Yeah! Matching me and Taxi!

So fun right? LOL! With the Color Swap shooting mode, you can change most of the things around you to whatever color you wish! An idea came to mind that day, the next time I bring out my Canon camera, I’m going to bring along a color wheel too! Wahahahahaha! Then I can change almost everything to whatever color I want! Without touching Photoshop!

Lastly, this one is great for “emo” shots imo.

This is done with the Color Accent mode. You pick a color from an object in the shot, and when you capture the shot, all the other non-choosen color will turn to grey tone while the picked color will be shown. You’ll often see this kind of photos in wedding albums right? Where the ring lah, roses lah or red packets are highlighted. Now you can shoot like a pro too!

Alright, so you can take very fun and cool and pro-like photos with these cameras, what about HD videos? I shall let this short montage I created speak for itself… *coughs*

Watch HD version at WaterWorld with Canon PowerShot SX210 IS from claudia on Vimeo. CORRECTION! This video is shot on the SX 210 IS! The titles in the video has got major typo! It’ll take another 2 hours for the video to be rendered and uploaded and processed. So… :(

We had so much fun shooting with the Canon PowerShot SX210 IS and Canon Digital IXUS 130, Diana and I only managed to get onto three rides. All the rest were boring to us. LOL! So my take on USS? Don’t go now! Wait till all the rides are operational first! Else you’ll be wasting your money on that very expensive piece of paper (the entrance ticket lah!).

Ending this post off with more photos from that day…

So many warnings yet we took the ride!

Diana at start of ride (shot taken at risk of camera falling into water!)

Diana at end of ride – *soaked* LOL!

Turning the Mummy castle blue!

Fish-eye on Canon PowerShot SX210 IS with the IXUS 130

Rounder Noel! (LOL!) aka August Man A-Listers

That’s all folk! If you like these cool features, go check out the latest range of Canon cameras yio!

While we planned this trip, we didn’t know that it was also the soft opening for Universal Studio. When we knew about it, we thought we’ll be stuck in major jam going into Sentosa. Glad that didn’t happen. Traffic was smooth and the place wasn’t as packed as we thought.

We didn’t get chance on the first day to dip into the cool pool at Siloso Beach Resort. The waterfall is enticing us to get in there quick.

And our initial plan to go on a mini-adventure with rides on the Luge and Segway wasn’t fulfilled since the sky didn’t give us the chance to. It rained the entire day while we were there. Most part of the day was spent watching cables in the room and short walk along the beach when we thought the rain stopped. But it poured shortly after we started our walk. *sobz*

Not wanting to go back to the room and watch boring cables, we took the Sentosa Express to Resort World in the late noon. That was when our exploration started! If you’d missed my previous post, check what we did at RWS that night!

With just a few hours on day 2, we woke up as early as we could, had our breakfast and met a cute friend…

Then the rest of the morning was spent in the cold cold pool.

Just a one day getaway was too too short. I want to wake up with view of the beach more often. When will our next getaway be?

Universal Studio Singapore

There was a long queue outside the entrance in the late noon. Wonder if those folks got to go on all the rides before the theme park closes at 6pm. (Which we didn’t know when we were there.) We hang around nearby and visited Hershey’s Chocolate World, had our dinner at Chili’s and was about to leave the place. This was when we saw no queue at the entrance and people were going in and out of Universal Studio without showing any tickets! Oh! It’s open to public after 6pm! (At least that was what happened that night!) Hope this is how they roll! Everyone can then enter to shop and dine and check out the interesting buildings in there.

Shrek the Star Character

The Darkroom

Here’s where you can get your photos printed. I think here’s also the place where you can buy and pick up shots of you taken around the theme park by their official photographers. I like the big camera which is cleverly integrated as the window display!

Universal Studio Store

In here you’ll be able to buy gifts and stuff from Universal Studio. Was expecting the prices to be non-pocket friendly, but true is, the items sold in there are very affordable! No wonder every shopper in there went crazy that day!

I’ve got my eyes on three items from there, but didn’t get them in the end. First is this t-shirt…

If it was “2-4-7″ printed on it, I would have gotten it immediately! You know why don’t you? :P The other thing I wanted was this Betty Boop comb. Cute right?

Lastly its this zodiac pin. I’m sucker for such pins, but from my memory, all the pins I bought over the years had just recently ended up in the trash bin. So I’m controlling my impulse buying behavior! Its a bad bad habit I MUST kick!

Other building I caught on my camera was this…

Can’t recall what’s inside though. But it looks like a theatre or sort. Anyone know?

Just before we left the place after the fireworks display, I saw these and wished I can put them in my house! I like these retro looking display! If you think you can buy newspaper off these, then sorry, these are fakes.

Here’s the fireworks display we waited 30minutes for…

Well it was worth the wait. We almost missed the show cause we didn’t know about it till we exited the place and was on the way to the sentosa express station when we saw the sign with show details! It’s the one and only one that’ll be happening. So well, at least I witnessed a piece of history at Universal Studio Singapore! LOL!

Can’t wait to go to the theme park for the rides!