If you’ve heard the horror story of old school Eastern Bloc bread lines, let me tell you about the wait to buy a basic economy car if you were a private citizen in socialist East Germany. It could take 10 to 15 years to receive delivery of a basic front-engine front-wheel-drive wagon that was powered […]
In Scandinavian folklore, trolls are ugly, evil, dangerous giants that lived in caves and roamed the countryside at night. Trolls liked to eat humans, or if they weren’t hungry, throw stones at people and descry their villages. Nowadays trolls roam the internet at night and make life difficult for the thin skinned and easily offended. […]
I was thinking the other day that one of the smaller effects of the cold war in the US, is that we didn’t have much chance to sample consumer products of a true socialist state. It might have dulled the current enthusiasm for restricting choices of deodorant. If you’d still like to give it try, […]
Nothing says you are cool like a vintage Volkswagen Camper, except they are too big to park on the street in your trendy gentrifying urban neighborhood without offending somebody, and they are far too common…what you really need is something that matches your Che Guevara t-shirt and ironic Mao calf tattoo — like this 1958 […]
The Trabant 601 was a small passenger sedan from the Soviet side of the Berlin Wall. It was the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany) equivalent of the Volkswagen Beetle and produced in staggering numbers. This next feature is one of the almost 3,000,000 Trabis to leave the production line in Zwickau, Germany. Find this 1989 […]
The Wartburg 353W was an East German built family sedan produced starting in 1968 and continuing with only minor changes all the way to 1988. In that time over 1 million of the oil burning 2-stroke powered sedans were released into the world, but you’ll be hard pressed to see one in the wild today. […]