3. Housing and city and countryside

3. Housing and city and countryside

Houses look different in different countries. It depends for example on weather, surface and on money too. In northern countries, there is often a fireplace in the living room, because of colder weather. On the other hand, in southern countries people prefer cool stone floors and no carpets.

Kinds of housing

We know lot of kinds of housing. For example, the terraced houses are built in a row and are joined one to another to form a street. Two houses joined together by one common wall are called a semi-detached house. A detached house stand by itself and isn’t joined to another house. A bungalow is a one-storey house and a cottage is a small house in village.

Housing in the Czech Republic

In Czech Republic people live mainly in family houses or in flats. Of course, it depends on money or on an age. Many older people with kids, who are living in the flat in town, have a cottage in the countryside and they like spending their weekends there to be also in nature. Families living in houses like spending time on their garden. For Czechs is an important place for relaxing, but also for growing vegetable.

Housing in the English-speaking countries

A British house is situated in a small garden and has two storeys. (= podlaží) It’s usually designed for a family of four or five people. There is a hall, a front room, a back room, a kitchen, a pantry (= spíž) and a storage space downstairs. A garage can be attached to the house. In the first floor is usually one big bedroom and two smaller ones, bathroom and lavatory (= koupelna). I think, that the most known difference between our and British housing is, that they are normally going with shoes in house independently on the weather.

My house

I live with my parents, grandma and little sister in the detached house in peripheral part of Hradec Králové. Because of grandma we have a house, that is built for two generations, and she lives upstairs and have her own kitchen, living room and workroom. In this floor is my bedroom and my sister’s room too. Next to our house is a garage and pergola, where we do celebrations and grilling together. We also have a swimming pool and small playground for my sister. In the other part of our garden, that is behind the house, we have a place for growing vegetable where is mostly my grandma, because it’s her hobby. In the house live with us our pets. We usually say for a fun that we have a small zoo, because we have two cats, a hamster, a rabbit, two lizards, three aquariums for fishes, one tortoise [tóts] and a dog called Charlie, who is mine.

Home

Home means a lot of different things to everyone. In my opinion, home is a place where you can return in any time you need and you are there welcome. It’s place where we usually grew up, so we have a relation to it. Because of good atmosphere and feeling of safety we don’t miss anything at home. But everything depends on relationships between family members.