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Posted by Amanda Kendle Aug 30, 2007 |
A few years ago, I landed at Vladivostok Airport and was met by a charming young Russian guy whose face I can still picture clearly. Perhaps that's because I link it with the terror I felt as he drove me from the airport into the Vladivostok city center.
During our car ride, I remember this man explaining about the Russian cars that were built during the communist era, and proudly boasting that they were far superior to East Germany's Trabants, built "from rubbish", he said. This comment came flooding back to me as I read the latest novel from Marina Lewycka called Two Caravans. One of the characters, a Ukranian man named Vitaly, describes how his father had a sky-blue Zaprozhets 965, one of the first mass-produced "workers' cars" in Ukraine. And he was proud because it had a "real metal body - not fibreboard rubbish like the Trabant". While these old cars are increasingly rare across Eastern Europe, you should definitely try to see one when you travel - it's really amazing that some of them ever functioned.