How To: Moving to Olomouc

Here are my notes summarizing answers to some questions regarding visiting and/or moving to Olomouc that I had myself, and got asked by other people. Hopefully, someone finds it useful! There are lots of tourist guides around, I focus here on the points that I found particularly important for myself. Note that everything on this page is provided “as is” for the information purpose only: use it at your own risk!

General Information: Country, Language and Money

Olomouc is located in the Czech Republic, somewhat close to the geometric center of Europe.
The city name is pronounced somewhat like ‘ALL-OH-MOATS’
The spoken language is Czech. Czech language uses Latin alphabet, slightly extending it by using diacritics. The diacritical marks call for caution: while for vowels they only change the duration, the consonants change completely: Č is not [ts] but in fact [tch]. Keep this in mind when dealing with names.
Many things are available only in Czech, though the situation gradually improves. The locals are hospitable to foreigners, and they appreciate a lot foreigners’ attempts to communicate using Czech instead of starting directly in English. Get a dictionary on your phone, and add a shortcut to Google Translate to a visible spot. The latter offers a very reasonable translation to English and back.
The currency is Česká Koruna/Czech Crown (Kč/CZK). Over the course of last 10 years, 1 CZK ≈ 0.04 EUR (with small deviations). If necessary, it is possible to use small Euro notes (below 100 €) to pay in most supermarkets, though they will use their own exchange rate [beneficial for them] and give you change in CZK. Paying by card is available almost everywhere except the smallest kiosks.
If you ever decide to exchange currency in cash, make sure you know how the banknotes look. A common tourist trap seems to be disguising 1000 Hungarian Forints (HUF) [or another currency] as 1000 CZK (1000 HUF ≈ 62 CZK). Never use currency exchanges near tourist attractions, they offer terrible rates and demand huge fees. The Czech officials know this, so there is a law mandating the exchange point to explicitly tell you the exact amount of money you will get before the exchange. Always exercise this right of yours.
Usually, a good rate is offered by the so-called ‘Arabian Exchange’ on Panská street in Prague, in particular, this one.

Reaching Olomouc

The nearest international airports to Olomouc are Prague (PRG), Vienna (VIE) and Bratislava (BTS). Brno (BRQ) is the closest, but it is very small with very few destinations. More options are Ostrava (OSR), Pardubice (PED), Katowice (KTW), Krakow (KRK) which I never tried. If you’re curious, here’s a map of the international airports.
Whichever you choose, plan your journey to Olomouc using timetables. In the unlikely case of this link dying, you may search for IDOS which stands for Informační DOpravní Systém (Informational Transportation System). Here’s a Wikipedia link describing what it is (currently, in Czech only).

A few useful queries are
If you arrive to Prague, normally you take the Airport Express (AE) bus from the airport to the main railway station, then take a train from there to Olomouc. The AE departs from Terminal 1 and requires purchasing a ticket from the driver. I guess it is possible to buy it elsewhere but I have never seen anyone not paying to the driver. Recently, it became possible to pay by card though it feels risky.
If you easily get car sick (like me), take the bus 119 from the airport buying the ticket from a vending machine right at the bus stop. The bus terminates near the metro station Nádraží Veleslavín (green metro line) which is impossible to miss after you leave the bus. The Railway station in Prague is at the station Hlavní nádraží on the red line, switch between the lines at Muzeum station.
If you arrive to Vienna, it is possible to take a bus (Flixbus, RegioJet) directly from the airport to Olomouc. I believe that Flixbus has a direct bus, whereas with Regiojet you will have to switch buses in Brno.

Personally, I dislike buses and prefer trains. The trains leave from Vienna Main Railway station (Wien Hbf). Unfortunately, there are currently no direct trains from Vienna to Olomouc. Possible routes involve connections in Břeclav, Brno, Česká Třebová or Přerov, of which I prefer the last one. Přerov is the closest to Olomouc and the trains from there are quite frequent (≈ 4/hour). In practice this means that even if the train from Vienna is late, the waiting time in Přerov will not be long.
Most tickets can be purchased online which alleviates any potential language barriers.
Most tickets work as a QR-code (or a similar barcode) and don’t require to be printed. Within the Czech Republic, the purchased train ticket will be issued to your name, so you may be asked an identity proof (passport or a similar document).
When buying intercity tickets, I strongly suggest reserving a seat, even if that’s not mandatory.
When planning an intercity journey, have in mind potential delays e.g. due to border controls at the airport etc. Study the intercity ticket return policies. Some tickets can be returned without fees up until 30 minutes before the journey, some don’t refund anything on the journey date.
I’d like to note the existence of https://rome2rio.com which is capable of planning journeys between arbitrary cities. It can be useful to learn about Its timetables are not too accurate though.

Transportation in Olomouc

In Olomouc, use buses or trams to travel. The trams are very convenient, I think I did not use any buses at all until having spent around 2 years in Olomouc.
You can buy tickets from vending machines (most require coins, but the one at the main railway station accepts cards), by sending sms, or via app (presumably, if you click this link on your mobile device, it will resolve to either App Store or Google Play). Chances are, the app is Czech language-only.
Here’s some information about the tickets. I’d note in passing that it is possible to buy monthly, quarterly or yearly tickets which are pretty cheap, from the main office of the travel agency. Buying those requires a photo of yourself (they will staple it to the ticket which is not transferable).
To plan your journey in Olomouc use the same timetables as for the intercity journeys.
You can enter station names in search forms without diacritical marks. E.g., the students dormitory is at the station called ‘Neředín, krematorium’, but writing ’neredin’ brings up a popup with the fully correct spelling.
To find the station names use Google Maps, or their Czech equivalent, https://mapy.cz. Apparently, mapy.cz is gradually learning public transport timetables.

Getting Visa

The ones who won the lottery of life by being born in a country of powerful passports can happily skip this section.

So you made a short visit to Olomouc, loved the city and the university, and decided to come here for a postdoc (or to do a Ph. D. with us). Great! If you are a third country national, you need a visa to come and work in Olomouc.

Outside of the Czech Republic, the visa can be issued by the Czech embassy or consulate. Here is a list of those in different countries. The embassies/consulates are governed by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs whose site https://www.mzv.cz can be consulted for useful information. Inside the Czech Republic, the visa questions are considered by Ministry of Interior that also has an informative page here.
When you find the embassy near you, find out (i) the type of visa you need, (ii) which documents are required, and (iii) how to arrange an appointment in embassy. You can consult other sources of information, but it is likely that the embassy/consulate will follow their own rules. Hopefully, they have the rules published somewhere.
Most likely, you will need a Long-Term Residence Permit (Povolení k dlouhodobému pobytu) with the purpose of scientific research. Your experience may vary, but usually the list is built around standard documents that prove your income and accommodation, which are most often provided by the University. VERY IMPORTANT: typically in this list there is an excerpt from the penal register. Essentially, this is a paper from your ministry of interior saying that you have no criminal record. This paper is often overlooked, and it takes some time to obtain. In Russia, it took me about 60 days to get this document back in 2013. For me, that was the longest delay for getting the residence permit.
Finally, you have to submit the documents to the Czech officials. Usually, this is done through an appointment which you have to book in advance (it was about two months in my case). Since the interval between booking and the actual appointment can be quite large, it makes sense to book this appointment quite in advance. Importantly, the appointment for submitting my application involved an interview in Czech language. It was not expected that I will speak Czech myself, so the appointment booking form explicitly stated that I have to bring a translator. Your experience can be different, and I write this only to illustrate that different things are possible.

Renting Flat

In principle, it is possible to arrange a flat for rent from outside the Czech Republic, https://foreigners.cz seems to be doing that. I’d expect they demand a significant fee.
Normally, flats for rent are advertised through agencies, the agencies post the flats on sites like https://sreality.cz or https://ulovdomov.cz (I did not try the second one).
https://sreality.cz has an option to switch to English, but I’d strongly suggest not doing that. Apparently, the agents are expected to fill the info for the English version separately, but almost no one does that properly. Consequently, the English version lacks important information. The solution is to use Google translate on the Czech version.
Usually, to start the renting, you pay the agent’s fee (1 month rent) and also you make a deposit to the landlord (this depends, usually, 1 or 2 months rent), so this can be costly. The landlord deposit is considered to be [at least in principle] returnable.
An important question to clarify is payment for the water, energy, gas, internet etc. The price for that can be included in the rent, or can be a separate payment. A seemingly popular practice is to make the tenant to have an individual contract with electricity and gas supply.
- To illustrate this with my own experience, in 2016 we started renting a new flat for which the rent was announced as ‘XX CZK + YY CZK for services’. This notation suggests that we were supposed to pay XX + YY to the landlord, of which he was supposed to keep XX, and deposit YY to the heat/water/etc provider. Once a year the actual spending is compared with the deposits and the difference is compensated (I think, we typically deposited more than used, so we got some money back).
- It was a surprise for me that the gas and electricity have to be paid separately to the provider. This required a visit to their office to start a contract [then once more to close it when we moved out], and was one more payment (about 1000 CZK) which I did not originally expect.

In the end, renting is always risky, and there is no guarantee to be fully safe. The flat we rented in 2016 used to not have the hot water after 22:00. Apparently this was by agreement of the locals with the water provider, I guess they saved a few pennies on that. I learned that by an experiment going to the shower around 21:59. I had no idea this can be possible, no one told me about that, and I doubt I could do something to find it out before moving in.

Minor things

Most restaurants post daily their lunch menu on olomouc.cz or menicka.cz, the last one sorts restaurants by distance to your position
In the Czech Republic, permanent residents (longer than 6 months) are expected to pay the trash fee [there’s a link to the information in English]. In 2024, the fee is 804 CZK per person. The payment is doable online, but apparently you first have to attend the place at least once to be entered in the system.