Sometimes you can smell a restaurant before you get there. With the langar hall you hear it first. Imagine the din of thousands of metal trays clanking and banging. You take your metal bowl as it's handed to you then your metal tray then you can fish a spoon out of a giant tub as you're moved down the hall and, in our case, up the stairs to the massive dining hall. You don't dawdle here, they've got the system down pat and if you slow down to look around you're likely to get plowed down.
On the floor are long jute runners which indicate the designated seating area. You move in and sit down on the floor with your tray on the floor in front of you. You have to be quick because the guys who are racing around with huge metal buckets of food are hustling and they clearly haven't trained in Lausanne to become waiters. If anything they may have practiced at San Quentin because you're left with a feeling that this might be what it's like in prison.
Ladleful of watery rice pudding ... slop, ladleful of dal ... slop, scoop of veggies (that day it was some kind of pumpkin) ... plop, roti ... catch it. Despite the brusque serving style, the volunteers (every bit of work in the temple is done by volunteers) are smiling and the atmosphere is congenial.
Once you get over the shock and dig into the actual food you'll find it actually quite wholesome and good. It's free, it's all-you-can-eat and the buckets keep passing by offering seconds or thirds.
Despite us gringos clearly holding the starring role as "dinnertime entertainment" there's no lingering over the meal here and it's pretty clear that there won't be any after-dinner coffee coming when they start splashing buckets of water on the floor in front of you to clean up for the next "service". It's time to move on.
On the way out you deposit your bowls and spoons in big tubs and give your trays to guys who's job it is to whack them as loudly as they can on the side of a huge waste container to knock off any residue and pass them over to the crew who number in the hundreds and must suffer permanent hearing loss after volunteering for washing up duty. The clanging noise is incredible!
Everything is on a massive scale here from the dal cooked in kettles that would easily double as jacuzzis in a suite in Aspen, the assembly-line production of rotis to the mountains of vegetables that groups of pious peelers are laboring away at on the floor.
Unfortunately we took no pictures to share with you...but thanks to the miracle of Google images I found some online!
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