2022
We had a great meetup at Mr. Sandee’s restaurant. I had the idea for this small dinner meetup after attending Sun’s giant, full-featured meetup. Sun’s meetup was so cool, and had a full program, a lucky draw where almost everyone won a prize, and had a speech from the business owner and a bunch of other cool stuff. Sun is also so popular here in Bangkok that he got about 40 people to attend.
One of the things that Sun and I have been talking about is how to get other people in Thailand to feel comfortable doing their own meetups and participating more, and so I thought I’d make a really casual meetup that could be a model for anyone else in Thailand that wanted to do a meetup.
I picked Mr Sandee’s restaurant, because that’s my favorite Thai restaurant. From the street, it doesn’t look like anything special, but he has the best Thai-style fried rice and the best nam-prik (I’m not sure the word in English,but in Malaysia/Singapore they call it chili patty). All of Sandee’s other food is excellent, too, especially the papaya salad, and he even has specialty items such as fried frogs.
So, we had a really small meetup. It was casual, and we talked about all of the things that were on the agenda, and then we relaxed and hung out and got to know each other. I told about why I thought they picked me for Connect 2017, and I gave my advice for getting ready to make a submission for Connect 2018. I talked about all of the different ways that you can contribute to Google Maps and the Connect community, and I talked about how the localguidesconnect is a great place for learning more about Google Maps. A lot of the people that attended travel often, so I mentioned that often airport shops don’t have many contributions, so airports are actually great ways to internationally contribute to Google Maps, especially if you have a long layover.
I also gave an example of a photosphere, and I took a photosphere by Mr. Sandee’s restaurant. I told everyone to stay really still, but a few people turned out blurry.
Kiie talked about his contributions to Google Maps, and how he’s really interested in Local Guides because he often works on SEO. Kiie’s a Level 6. Narindra had never contributed to Google Maps before, and he was very interested to learn about it. He asked a lot of questions.
Mr. Sandee keeps telling everyone the story about how I like his fried rice so much that for months, I would go to his restaurant many times a week and order nothing but fried rice and Thai-style omelet. We took some pictures with Mr. Sandee. His wife said that foreigners who really like the food will usually ask for pictures with Mr. Sandee, so now whenever I go to his restaurant I always try to take a few selfies with him. Oh, and the food was delicious. We actually ate most of it before we took pictures, which even though I've taken thousands of food pictures for Google Maps, I sometimes forget.
Here's the papaya salad.
And this is the Thai version of ceviche. They call it "fresh shrimp." It is delicious, but I'm always very wary of anything "cooked with lime."
Here's Mr. Sandee's listing on Google Maps. https://goo.gl/maps/bb6RLb26E7q
And, here’s my original introduction to the meetup from: https://maps.google.com/localguides/meetup/d1ced5af485b4d0587148ae5d8f8dee0
This will be a small, casual meetup. I'll talk about taking photospheres and give some demos. I'll also talk about Local Guides Summit 2017. It was such a cool experience. I'll give my tips for if you want to apply for Local Guides Summit 2018. For background on why I picked this place...when I first came to Bangkok, I lived on Mr. Sandee's street for about four months. His restaurant was actually a big inspiration for me being such an active local guide, because every night I ate here, I kept thinking, "This place isn't even on Google. There must be something that I can do to help with that!" A year later I found Local Guides and found that there actually was something I could do. It turned out the Mr. Sandee did have a Google Listing, but it was two streets away, and only in Thai. I helped to move it to the right place, put a translation in English, write a review, and upload some pictures. I'm actually not sure if it helped yet very much, since I don't speak much Thai and Mr. Sandee doesn't speak much English. But I really like adding my food pictures to his restaurant whenever I go back. That's why I picked his place for the meetup. It's small, but cozy. Note that this isn't a hosted meetup, we'll all pay for our own dinners, and nobody's under any obligation to make any contributions to Mr. Sandee's business.
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