On leaving Eisenach

I have officially left Eisenach, but not before an Eisenach-sized (thus charming and petite) adventure before leaving.

Our Brooklyn Doyenne extraordinaire, who is one of the faculty members of the institute and with whom I taught in Brooklyn years ago, took us on a little hike through to another part of Eisenach. She had found that part of Eisenach when she took the 'easy', i.e. 13% grade incline path DOWN from Wartburg Castle. (not that I'm bitter, ahem. :) Speaking of Wartburg Castle, here is a shot of it from Eisenach (which lies at the foothill/mountain of it) at night.

On this hike, we passed a pretty house/B&B restaurant that I was taking a picture of...

when an older man stopped me and said, IN GERMAN, that really, it's not a pretty house. It's a house that the DDR used to live in. That the really pretty house was the "kaput villa" where DDR and/or Stasi (damn, I wish my German was better as I think he was telling me interesting stuff) lived. Look at this villa--amazing and SO forlorn.

Of course, despite the dire warning (actually, we still don't know what it says, but it seems dire...), the Brooklyn Doyenne and Jungmaestro tried to get inside. yikes.

Mostly I say yikes, because next door is a building that was Nazi and Stasi (?) headquarters in Eisenach. Now it's the Bach School for music. Look how scared we are...

Anyway, we decided to go find some 'lake' that was in Eisenach. It was more kind of a park/canal kind of thing, but it was't very far and proved a good place to take a last fun picture in this great Intro-to-Germany town.