Five o'clock shadow

Joining the back of the snake like procession to the main temple at Fo Guang Shan Monastery in Taiwan at five o’clock in the morning is a pretty surreal thing. On entering we are guided to benches at the side of the monastery while the monks find their places like a row of pushed down dominoes. A few seconds pass and then drums begin to beat and chanting starts to stir the body into life in a whole new way.
We are encouraged to join in by an enthusiastic monk who points to the words in a fashion that makes no sense at all. All the time the body is being stimulated as the chanting gets louder and louder till your body starts to tingle and you feel a strange urge to join in. After an hour everything stops and it goes back to deadly silence, a monk rings a bell and the dominoes stand up and snake their way back out the door and down the hill.
We immediately get up and start to follow down the hill to the large communist looking dining hall. On arrival we are given pride of place sitting in the front row of a dining hall that seats six hundred monks. The rest of the monks make their way to their respective places based on their standing in the monastery.
Once again it goes silent and everyone bows their heads but a little sneak view enables me to see a few monks with big buckets of porridge dishing it out on to people’s plate closely followed by three stalks of pak choi. A bell chimes and the monks start to devour their breakfast, we on the other hand look at each other and think is six o’clock in the morning a good time to eat this or is there a good time to eat pak choi and porridge? I think to myself in for a penny and set about eating the breakfast, surprisingly it goes down easily with a large glass of water.
The only tricky thing to do now is place the cutlery back down in the order we were shown, this is more like the krypton factor than a straight forward finish to a meal. After a couple of minutes I manage it and lean back on my chair and think of the great experience I have just been part of.