Study medicinein Czechia

Czech food is beef, pork, bread dumplings and sauces. Learn svíčková na smetaně (beef in a creamy root-vegetable sauce with dumplings and cranberry), vepřo knedlo zelo, guláš, řízek, smažený sýr and kulajda, a dill and mushroom soup with a poached egg.

Olomouc has one speciality all its own: Olomoucké tvarůžky, a ripened low-fat cheese with a smell that arrives before it does. It goes fried, marinated, baked and — reportedly — on pizza. Locals are proud of it and you should try it once.

⭐ Then the part that matters for Muslim students, and it is genuinely unusual for a city this size. Al Firdaus, the Olomouc Muslim community, was founded in 2009 by Malaysian medical students at Palacký and exists mainly to serve foreign medical students. It runs Friday Jumu'ah at 13:30 with separate prayer rooms for brothers and sisters, and organises weekly halal meat orders from a certified butcher in Brno, collected at the dormitory on Sunday afternoon. ⚠️ It opens for Jumu'ah rather than five daily prayers — worth knowing before you arrive.

Palacký prices its dorms per bed per night rather than monthly, and publishes more than one tariff depending on your student category — so treat €140–240 a month as a planning range and get your actual residence rate confirmed. A room in a private shared flat runs €260–400, a studio €520–680.

Realistic totals: €520–640 a month in a dorm living frugally, €800–960 sharing privately, €1,280–1,640 living alone comfortably. Student transport is about €8 a month, and your ISIC gets you 50% off Czech trains and buses nationwide.

⚠️ Olomouc has no commercial airport — but the rail more than makes up for it. Prague is 2h15 by direct fast train, and Prague flies direct to Oslo, London, Istanbul and Dubai. Ostrava has direct Ryanair to London Stansted, Kraków is 3h28 by rail and Brno about an hour. For a Norwegian this is arguably cleaner than Bydgoszcz or Košice: one direct flight, one direct train. Emergency numbers are 112, 155, 158 and 150.