I grew up attached to the kitchen window, guessing the car brands passing by on the boulevard in front of the apartment building. And as I opened my mouth delighted that there was another car passing under the window, bang! my mother put another spoonful of food into my mouth... And I was desperately running out when the garbage truck came in the back of the garages to watch the entire “ballet” of the rubbish carts skillfully spun towards the noisy car that swallowed their content...

One day when I was coming home with the empty trash bucket, I noticed with big eyes, the open garage of our neighbour, who although lived door to door with us, had an enigmatic, cold appearance with whom we interacted no more than the polite greeting. All I knew about him from my own observations, was that he had an Oltcit car that he cared for excessively.

That day, through the open garage door, I noticed half of the clean white Oltcit and next to it, as if out of place, a large pile of scrap paper.

He noticed me, as I had stopped with my mouth open in amazement, admiring his shiny car that seemed to peek from behind the door, and then he made me a sign to approach. Without a word he took out of the pile a magazine with cars “FROM THE WEST”.

I remember that the stairs to the apartment seemed endless, multiplied by my impatience to get to see how many cars I can recognize. Besides the fact that in the communist Brasov all the cars were White, Beige, Grey or Blue, Dacia, Oltcit, Skoda or Trabant and what I saw in those pages was an explosion of colours and models, more or less wonderful... nothing impressed me so much until I got to one... A PICTURE is worth a thousand words, all at once, that shook my reality.

A little frog VW covered with turf, with flowers, was carefully watered and cared for, just like my neighbour’s Oltcit, but it was not a trivial colour, it was something unencountered!

No car has ever been as interesting to me as that grassy frog VW was for a 5-year-old kid with a fascination for cars, in a Communist Romania with 4 brands in 4 colours...

Emil Roata, Brasov