First of all I would like to say that I am truly glad and hopeful to be able to participate at the Connect Live 2019! I feel that I have a lot of many experiences of travelling and knowing different places that I can share and help somehow. Through these years, I have been visited for work, study or as a tourist many places and I have been accumulated many good living experiences and ideas that I fell a necessity that I need to use them somehow not only at my community, but also anywhere I go.
My favorite hobby is to travel and to know new cultures and places. In these trips I always try to get all information and experiences that I can get from different sites, the good and the bad ones, so I can bring these experiences to my community and maybe improve my city.
When I travel I also try to escape from traditional tourism that many times just takes us to artificial experiences. In these cases, I really want to know closely the local way of living and I am able to do it by using the Google Maps which gives me a chance to organize my trips according to reviews and comments of other users because I know that these comments and photos of users are not paid advertising, they are true experiences of people who have been recently at these places.
So every time I plan a trip, I start it using the Google to check what I can visit at the place that I will be going according to what other people have said about their experiences there. I also search what I can see in the road to the place that I am going so my trip may be more pleasurable. My route is chosen for me considering always what I can visit in the road, not only the fast way to arrive at my final destination.
A few years ago, I made my first travel planning and marking some places at the Google Earth. Then I continued using the same map file to mark some other places and I kept using it for many years of my live. Nowadays I have a huge kmz file that I am always marking new places to visit and I organize then in two colors: green markers for places that I already visited and yellow markers for places that I pretend to visit. Here are some examples of areas that I have marked a lot of different palces to visit:
Once I planned a trip from Charlotte, where I lived for a few months, to visit some cities in northern Florida and Georgia and, for this trip, I searched about bridges that I could see in the road because I love bridges! I am a civil engineering by the way. I marked some of these bridges in my trip map so I could visit them while I was driving.
Besides, I have travelled around many cities, including some places in Europe, United States and Brazil. So, I have a considerable knowledge about many places and I have accumulated many pictures from many different places that I can share.
I not only mark places that I would like to know but I also like to contribute with other people experiences with my own livings so I have always sent my pictures to Google Maps so they could be used there.
Since I realized how much I could contribute with other users, I started to upload more and more pictures, almost all my pictures actually and I have been written many reviews and comments about many different places around the world that I have visited. I have been doing it not only to help these places to be more known in their communities, but also to give to the users of Google apps some good and fair reviews about services, restaurants, bars, stadiums.