Another day for a run, again through the cold crisp park. It’s Monday so most museums are closed, other than the Stasi Museum – the old Stasi headquarters, with some of the rooms preserved as they were. The exhibits are great, lots of artefacts from phone-tapping kits (including confiscated western cassettes, like Dylan’s Greatest Hits, which the Stasi would tape over and use to record people’s conversations) to really bad disguises, Stasi military outfits and weapons, and scent kits – cloth impregnated with people’s body odours and stored in jars, for use in identification of ‘dissidents’ by police dogs. An office was preserved as it had been – a crap bureaucrat’s office with low technology and no natural light – and another room had been mocked up like a Stasi prison cell. A really good, sobering exhibition, albeit of less value without the audioguide, as the text was all German. We also had a quick look through the Thomaskirche, the church where Bach was the cantor for 23 years and lived with his family. A beautiful deco style white interior makes the church worth visiting even without the historical connection – Bach’s bones are reputed to be buried in the church (no-one quite knows, as his grave was forgotten for a while, but there is reasonable evidence that it was re-discovered correctly, and his bones moved here). We get dinner from food stands in the railway station (which has a decent-sized two story shopping mall with many food shops)
We had a quiet night tonight as I had a job interview from NZ. We’d intended to run it via SKype, but that didn’t work out too well, so we had to switch to phone. I thought it went pretty well, though I was annoyed at wasting all the time I’d spent reconfiguring the room to get the light right (not behind me blinding the viewer, on my face) and the background/camera angles right (I’d settled on ‘laptop on chair, me on bed leaning over laptop’). The best thing about the evening was the sauna in the hotel basement – small, but a nice reminder of lovely German spa towns. Must make sure we get to at least one more on this trip.
