  We derive type IIB vacua which are very promising to put string theory to
experimental test. These are Calabi-Yau compactifications with a 4D fibration
over a 2D base. The moduli are fixed in such a way to obtain a very anisotropic
configuration where the size of the 2D base is exponentially larger than the
size of the 4D fibre. These provide stringy realisations of the supersymmetric
large extra dimensions scenario and extensions of the ADD scenario which are
characterised by TeV-scale strings and two micron-sized extra dimensions. We
also study the phenomenological properties of hidden Abelian gauge bosons which
mix kinetically with the ordinary photon and get a mass via the Green-Schwarz
mechanism. We show that anisotropic compactifications lead naturally to dark
forces for an intermediate string scale or even to a hidden CMB for the extreme
case of TeV-scale strings.
