Luckily, living on a budget doesn’t necessarily mean eating unhealthy defrozen plastic food served in most of the cheap restaurants. I recently discovered (with a little help from my friends Lia and Fandor) the AVIA café restaurant, offering great food for excellent prices, between CZK70-150 (€2.70-5.80) for a meal.

Cannelloni with béchamel and beef

The owners of Avia describe the place as a “puristic restaurant”, which works on several levels:

• The menu has only about 10 items, but there is a new menu every week. (See the current menu.)
• All fods served in Avia are simple jewels of mediterranean cuisine – pasta, fishes, beef and salads – with few ingredients but strong flavours.
• The restaurant is located in a basement of a functionalistic church built in the 1930s – this makes it a good place to have dinner after visiting the villa Tugendhat.
• There’s no music played in the restaurant. (I think jazz would be great, but I still prefer silence to the radio stations played in many other restaurants.)
• Avia is a non-smoking restaurant. But you guessed that already.

I like the interior, but one of my friends thinks it

I have eaten there for three or four times and I was always satisfied. Meals are simple and tasty, dishes are warm (a detail that is often skipped in three times more expensive restaurants), waiters and waitresses are quick and smiling and draught beer from Černá hora is one of my personal favorites.

I am just sad that all these things are still not a standard in the Czech republic.

Keep on rocking, Avia!

More photos

I am the worst food photographer ever, so check out these galleries and machine-translated articles:

• Photos & review by the most famous czech foodblogger, Martin Kuciel
• Photos & review by a Brno’s rising foodblogger Michal Sänger

Map

Avia is located at Botanická st., close to Art cinema, two blocks from Faculty of Arts.

Zvětšit mapu

Brno offers a high quality of life (at least in the context of eastern Europe) for a quite nice price.

Thinking about moving to Brno? These two tables will tell you all the prices you are wondering about.

Please remember that the numbers in euro were calculated on June 23, 2009 — they can change anytime soon.

Usual costs of living for an Erasmus student

Cost of living for a worker or a businessperson

On April 1st, Brno’s fares will rise again – actually they’ll beat Prague’s fares this time. The 60 minutes ticket is to cost CZK 22 (€0.77) and the 10 minutes ticket is to cost CZK 14 (€0.50).

Comment: I know that Brno Now should offer context to the news, but… there is no context, as there is no sense! The price of gas is extremly low. People have less money. The town hall is led by socialists and greens. So one could expect that the public transportation will be cheap. Fail. Actually, it already became cheaper to travel by car.

Just a quick tip: follow Ryanair_BRQ at microblogging site Twitter.com. You’ll be the first one to know about all special deals for planes going from or to Brno airport.

You could fly to London for CZK 1 (€0.04) one month ago – great price, wasn’t it?

I have been collecting brunensia (books and similar things having something to do with Brno) since 2005. I consider some of the books I have bought to be usable as very cool souvenirs or gifts – they are cheap, easy to be found, and really beautiful.

Brno

From all the photobooks about Brno I have ever seen (and I have seen probably all the photobooks about Brno), this one offers the most beautiful photos. Black and white, shot with old fashioned medium or large format cameras, poetic and funny.

And, hey, instead of boring descriptions, this book offers poems by Jan Skácel – you can see this guy’s verses at the modern fountain on Náměstí svobody sq. I know that this is not a big win for someone who doesn’t speak Czech, but the pictures do make it even alone and you can give this book as a gift to someone who will understand the poems well.

I bought the book for CZK 200 (€7.20) in an antiquarian bookshop at Pekařská st. (I don’t remember where exactly.)

Details

Hard cover: 218 pages
Publisher: Krajské nakladatelství v Brně (1964)
Language: Czech
Photographers: Miloš Budík, K. O. Hrubý, Vilém Reichmann

Brno: Významné centrum čs. průmyslu

The communist government printed this book to attract investors and to improve the business relations of Moravian factories and science institutions with foreign industries. The big benefit of this fact is that the book is partly written in English. The publication is filled with photographs of factories (some of which are currently been rebuilt into flats, shopping malls etc.) and plans of new factories (most of these have actually stayed on paper).

Details

Hard cover: 368 pages
Publisher: Útvar hlavního architekta města Brna, Městský svaz architektů Brno, Český fond výtvarných umění – DÍLO v Brně
Language: Czech, German, Russian, English

I recommend this book to everyone who wants to do any kind of business in Brno – the publication helps to understand the industrial history of the town and offers some demographic data that are interesting to compare with the current demography.

I got my copy at Veselá st., in Alfa antique. CZK 300 (€11.50) was a reasonable price. Sort of.

Eduard Milén: Brno

Eduard Milén (1891-1976) was a Czech painter known for cooperation with Leoš Janáček, but mostly for his paintings of Brno. I bought Milén’s monograph two years ago in an antiquarian bookshop at Kounicova st. for a very reasonable price of CZK 300 (€11.50).

Details

Hard cover: 160 pages
Publisher: Krajské nakladatelství v Brně (1960)
Language: Czech

P.S.: If you are into brunensia too, check out this great gallery of vintage maps of Brno.

Travelling by car may be now more reasonable than travelling by bus and tram lines in Brno: on the 1st December, the prices of some tickets rocked by 20 %.

One day ticket is now worth CZK 80 (€3.15) instead of CZK 60, coupon for one month costs CZK 530 (€20.80) instead of CZK 450 and one-year-coupon is worth CZK 4430 (€174; CZK 3700 until December).

Prices of all types of tickets are detailed at the website of the Public transport office of Brno.

According to the Czech Statistical Office, the current average gross monthly nominal wage in South Moravian Region is CZK 21,221 (€ 850).

South Moravia is one of the land’s poorest regions, as the average gross monthly nominal wage in the whole country is CZK 23,144 (€ 925).

Since Q3 2007, the average moravian wage has risen from CZK 19,500 (source: newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes), which means 14% rise.

The CSO report Average wage rose by 7.9%, real wage by 1.2% says:

The lowest relative growth of nominal wage (by CZ-NACE) was recorded in education (by 2.9%), public administration and defence; compulsory social security (by 3.7%) and health and social work (4.3%). The biggest growth was recorded in fishing (by 16.0%), mining and quarrying (by 15.3%) and agriculture, hunting and forestry (by 13.4%). The highest nominal wage (financial intermediation) was roughly 2.5times higher than the lowest nominal wage (hotels and restaurants).