Hlusovice

I live in a place called Hlusovice (pronounced Hloo-show-vits-eh), in Moravia, Czech Republic. To call Hlusovice a city is seriously stretching a point. It's a village near a city, Olomouc, which has about 100,000 inhabitants. This makes it pretty big by Czech standards. Olomouc is a beautiful place, with a compact centre that's hundreds of years old, and in my opinion it's just perfect. It's big enough to have everything you need and to be interesting, it's small enough to be human in scale and easy to get around and to make it easy to get to know people. It's on the UNESCO World Heritage list, chiefly because of a huge Marian column and a complex of fountains in the city centre.

Hlusovice is only a few kilometres outside Olomouc - I can get from my home to the teacher training college where I work on my bike in 25 minutes - but it really feels like another world.

There are maybe about 500 people who live in our village. It's a bit hard to be more precise as a lot of new houses are being built these days. Like so many places near bigger towns in this country, it's growing as a result of people moving out of the city, where many of them live in flatblocks built during the socialist era. There aren't a lot of facilities. We have a little railway station, from which there are about 20 trains a day to Olomouc and the same number back, a kindergarten, a church, a shop that sells basic groceries, and two pubs. There are also two fish ponds where you can go swimming or, in the winter, ice skating. There isn't even a post office; that's in the next village along, where there is also a school for grades 1-9 and various other facilities, including a swimming pool and sauna and - very Czech - a little distillery where members of the public can take their fruit for distilling into alcohol. Slivovice, made with plums, is the most popular.


I've been living in Hlusovice for two and a half years and I love it. It's very peaceful and relaxed and I know quite a lot of people as I tend to rather stand out - I am the only non-Czech passport holder living there. The photos show an ice hockey game on the village fishpond in winter, a shot of the bigger fishpond where people go to swim, a view from near my house as a storm brews, and a wayside cross with a view of the pilgriamge church at Svaty Kopecek ('the holy little hill').