Lada Cars

It seems that the series of unexpected encounters is continuing. Today we saw a Lada Niva, which is a Russian 4x4 made for the first time in the seventies. I had no idea that Lada was selling cars in Europe, Asia and even Australia, and I was even more surprised to see that this old Lada was still running. I am not sure how old was the model we saw (check the picture) today in the Wattle Park. The Lada cars available in Romania in the eighties were considered somewhat fancy cars, especially since they we not manufactured in the country. Yet, "lada" means box in Romanian, so I just thought of them as boxy Russian cars... To see them here, Down Under, it really means that the word is small and this continent is not that far away from the rest of the world.