"maykal's new Munster Page" a Munster Travel Page by maykal

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This is Munster but with a Yemeni slant! I went to Munster to visit my teacher who taught me Arabic in <a href="http://www.virtualtourist.com/m/.133814/209/?s=U">Yemen</a>, and through him I met the entire Yemeni population of Munster, and a good proportion of all Munster's Arabs and Turks. For me, this was great! I arrived in Germany with no German except "Zieh deine Wampe ein!", so it was good to spend 4 days talking non-stop in Arabic...not what most people go to Germany for!!
As I said on my Cologne page, again the emphasis was on visiting friends not touring the town, which in some ways was a bit of a shame, because what little I saw of Munster seemed to be very nice. It has to be pointed out though, that my Yemeni friends and I had different opinions about sight-seeing.....I would have been happy to have visited the churches and walked around the beautiful old town, but my Yemeni guides prefered to show me the cemetery and the department stores. On one occasion, we came across an African market (it was Afrikafest or something similar), but did we look round it?...NO, we went to the department store to marvel at the escalators (there are no escalators in Yemen, so I guess I can see where they were coming from).
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed my 4 days in Munster, and I couldn't have had better hosts. However, I did feel very guilty....I had only just met most of them on arrival in Munster, but they wouldn't let me pay for anything, refusing point blank any attempts made by me to pay the bill, even though they found Germany to be prohibitively expensive.

For those like me who do not know any German, "Zieh deine Wampe ein!" means something like "Put your belly in!" which may or may not be a useful phrase, depending on your point of view. At first, I was told it meant "Hello. How are you?" but I quickly worked that one out!

To see what I missed, visit the city <a href="http://publikom.muenster.de/tourismus/index.html">tourist office</a>.