This item is real and was never intended by its manufacturer to be a gag. Rather, Barack toilet paper is a good that has been displayed on Hungarian store shelves for generations and has nothing to do with the former Senator from Illinois who currently resides in the White House.
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Twenty years since the communist governments of Central and Eastern Europe collapsed, the popularity of one icon from the Cold War Era has not ebbed. At a time when most Central European children are familiar with Winnie the Pooh and Cookie Monster, Krtek, a Czech cartoon character that first appeared in the 1950s, can be also spotted throughout Prague, Budapest and beyond on t-shirts, DVDs, plush toys and numerous other products
The landscape for consumers in Central Europe has changed dramatically from what it was two decades ago when the last vestiges of the Communist states started crumbing. Large Western European supermarket chains, such as the British Tesco, the German Lidl and the Dutch SPAR, can now be found in most moderately sized towns in the region, and the ubiquitous brands of candy and cola globalization
From the moment they first rolled off the assembly line of the VEB Sachsenring auto plant in Zwickau, Germany in 1957, Trabants have been both cherished and ridiculed. Families in East Germany and other nations within the Iron Curtain had to wait as many as 15 years to get a Trabant; thus anybody who possessed one strove to take great care of it. The average lifespan of the more than 3 million Trabants which were manufactured was 28 years. Older Trabants sometimes cost more than newer versions because they could be procured more quickly.
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