Cars. There is a vibrant car culture in Romania. Here, BMW, Audi and Mercedes rule the roost.

As for American cars, Ford has a decent presence in the Romanian market. Chrysler, probably due to the Mercedes ownership is making small in-roads (Ha! Cranky made a funny). If you want a GM, well you can get one – sorta. Korean car manufacturer Daewoo is controlled by GM and is quite popular here.

What is suspiciously rare here is Toyota. The joke is that Toyotas are cars for Americans. I told them to go shove my Camry up their exhaust pipes.

French and Italian makes are by far the majority. Even Romania’s own car company, Dacia, is partially owned by Renault.

You’ve heard about the European trend towards small cars. Because of very high taxes and gas prices at about $5.50 per gallon, the small car rules here. There are no shortages of Audi A6s and BMWs here, but you know the drivers are paying dearly for it.

My collegue here (from the world-famous Deathwish in Romania video), loves cars. His ultimate would be the Mazda RX-8. But he seems to like the new Mustangs too.

So, without further ado, lets go to the pictures.

Cars:

Meet the Daewoo Tico – Target market: People with no driveways, little to no money and no will to live.

This is Andrei’s Fiat.

It looks as if they have come a long way in shaking off the Fix It Again Tony moniker.

The East German Trabant. Consider that while West Germans were perfecting engineering and quality, the repressed East was producing these. Now, go smack a Socialist on the head.

Passionate collecters meet to show off their so-bad-it’s-good vehicles. Like a VW Beetle get together except without the smells of Patchouli and doobage.

A pre-Renault Dacia with a disclaimer. They have improved considerably since.

So we had a little roadtrip adventure last weekend. Into the mountains West of Iasi. The thrilling part was going to the top of the mountain and staying at the resort hotel there. Well almost.

 

This one lane dirt road connected the last town and the mountain top. Please note the 100% organic wash-outs on the side of the cliffs. These pics are taken on the way down. On the way up it was dark and foggy. It took about 2 hours to go about 20 miles including breaks to see how deep the puddles in front of the car were.

The Mountain Lodge

The Mountain Peak

A lodge which was used by Romania’s facists – now a hotel. It was only $45/night.

From the hotel

Inside the Hotel:

 

The room. Did I mention that it was only $45/night?

ps.

I did make it to the mountain.

The obligatory shot. Sorry, I left my black-out eyes back at the hotel.

You stupid, stupid American.

UPDATE:

Thanks to my buddy Nigel for finding my censored-eye thing and creating a touching retrospective.

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