Bangkok -- Snakes and temples on day 2 of the trip

Day 2 in Thailand started with a visit to the sixth floor food court of the clothing warehouse building next to our hotel for some (admittedly disappointing) breakfast:

Gun possession is strictly forbidden in Vietnam, so it was a little jarring to see these shirts in Thailand.  We later learned people are permitted to own a gun in Thailand provided they have a license (and it appears the license process is far more elaborate and controlled than in the United States):

Off on a water taxi to explore Bangkok:

Carter played Prince Chulalongkorn in "The King and I" musical last Spring, so it was interesting to run across Chulalongkorn University.  We hung out in their food court for lunch:

And then it was off to the snake farm at the Red Cross in Bangkok.  We were hoping to catch them extracting the venom from snakes, which they use to develop antivenoms.  We missed that presentation, but we were able to stay for the 2:30 snake show, with a cool opportunity at the end:

After the snake show we headed out to another temple, this one clearly a working temple right in the middle of the city.  The temples in Bangkok, called wats, were numerous and spectacular.  Temples and pagodas in Hanoi are very modest in comparison, and you rarely see buddhist monks in Hanoi.  In Bangkok the monks are very visible, collecting alms and donations at the beginning of each day and strolling the temple grounds.

This school located right next to the temple reminded us a lot of schools in Hanoi, complete with courtyard and end-of-day assembly:

As part of the urban temple campus, they had cows and other county fair-type animals that you could feed.  A little surreal:

Noah's favorite building in Bangkok -- he called it the Minecraft Building:

Walking back to our hotel, we decided to take a detour to the local mall.  When we were talking to people about what to do in Bangkok, we always got two recommendations: go to the temples, and hang out in the malls.  Not surprisingly, the kids were big fans of one of those recommendations:

To end the day, we decided to try and walk up to the top of the temple that we could see out of our hotel room -- it looked spectacular, especially lit up at night.  Unfortunately it was closed after 5:30, a fact that we only discovered after climbing up half of the 350 steps to the top: