It was a very harrowing week starting on 23 March 2015 when it was announced that our first and former Prime Minister, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew had passed on.

While I had known that his death was kinda eminent and it not exactly a surprise but it still was very upsetting all the same when death actually happened.

I felt a very strong obligation to go pay my last respects to him even though I never really cared that much about politics or politicians. It had to be at the Parliament where the body laid and nowhere else. The other place where one could go pay tribute to him just wasn’t the same and it also felt like it doesn’t count… at least to me.

So that said, I joined the queue to pay my last respects at the Parliament just past midnight on 27 March 2015. I made it into the Parliament House at around 6.05 am. Crazy as it is, I made it home shortly past 7 am to get my luggage and flew straight off to Korea for my holiday.

With barely any sleep and a lot of emotions from seeing the photograph and the actual coffin, this recent trip to Korea definitely felt different from all my previous trips there.

I was actually pretty glad that there wasn’t any activities from the groups I liked when I was there because I certainly wasn’t really feeling up for any of it. It was also quite a strange and new feeling to be watching a State Funeral (and crying like hell) while on holidays.

As a result, I ended up not really being in the mood to be up for much as usual when I was in Korea and I even totally switched off from work, emails and social media for that entire week (on top of the week before when all the social media updates in Singapore was all about the late Lee Kuan Yew).

While I must admit that I did feel a bit lost not knowing what’s going on with the current affairs of the world, the short disconnect from everything was pretty refreshing.

Life must go on and time waits for no one. Normalcy will return soon and that said, I’ll be posting up some photos from this trip and sharing more experiences in my “Seoul Adventure” series over the next couple of days. Watch this space. ^^