LEGENDS OF TRANSYLVANIA

摘要

A journey through the land of Dracula in a Dacia 1310, the car that refuses to die. My first ride in a Dacia 1310, the last of the legendary people's cars of the twentieth century, was one I'll not I soon forget. My driver, iDorel Fleseru, called I his 1986 beater Olga, after a workhorse. He'd bought her for USD600. "From a nurse," he told me as he drove away from the train station at a rather reckless speed in hard rain. Olga stank. She smelled of benzene, oil, and age. Her tappets sang, her transmission clunked, her clutch squealed, one cylinder was misfiring, rain blew in through the driver's window, and the defroster, like the defroster in virtually every people's car ever made, from the Volkswagen Bug to the Citroen 2CV, was crap. Trailing blue smoke and dodging potholes, with Dorel swiping away at die windshield with a sponge, Olga barreled through Copsa Mica, one of the ugliest but most visually riveting cities on the planet. A dead factory, a sprawling skeleton gloved in the carbon it once manufactured, flashed as though lit by strobe lights when lightning forked down behind it. Adjacent to the black carcass stood a lead plant vomiting toxins into the sky.