I am a travel enthusiast. Love to visit new places, meet people, understand cultures / diversity.
I hail from beautiful city of lakes, Udaipur (India), and settled in IT Capital of India, Bangalore (Bengaluru) for 17+ years!
Very soon during my 1st international visit I realized that, traveling to a new place could add its own complexity/difficulty (language, food choices et al). Note : I am a vegetarian, and speaks Hindi, English & can manage with Indian Languages / dialects (Punjabi, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Kannada).
My first visit abroad was in 2006 (no smart-phones days), to Trondheim (Norway). I went with 2 of my colleagues and we were there for 3+ weeks! I had wonderful time, as it was my first encounter with Snow, temp in -ve (-17 C), and wonderful landscapes etc.
Yeah its me … at 11 am (and Sun had already set … that’s Norway during winters
)
All these overpowered the issues I was facing there, like explaining in a restaurant that I am not fine with egg, meat, fish (as weekend we were roaming on our own and did not had helping hand from our colleague to be the translators).
We had lot of fun there, first ice-skating experience !
Now when I look back, I felt that having access to info, maps (navigation!), translations etc could have multi-folded the whole experience !
(as I use all these now-a-days, and it comes very handy for local commute & eat-outs in NY, London, Prague, Berlin, Paris, HongKong, Bangkok and many more such travels for me).
Thus when I learnt about the Local-Guide program from Google, I knew I had the platform I wanted to make use and share my experiences (local & elsewhere), give authentic reviews, add photos & inspire people to visit new places (in short share my experiences, as it might help few in improving their travel experience). For me, if someone share their happiness after visiting places that I recommend (and I do that a lot, in many of my circles … from office colleagues to college friends to family members) … it feels awesome