Our school system is different because at home when you're 14, you choose what you want to do and go to study management, hairdressing, cookery, etc. so you're finished your training at 18. I studied management and tourism and, although I was a good student, I was lazy and didn't want to study more after that. I also knew I didn't want to stay in Roznov because it was too small and you can't earn enough money there.

When I was 18, Gabriela and I went for a weekend to Prague. We met two guys from Sicily and there was a sort of romance there. . . They invited us over for a holiday, so we went to Sicily for two weeks, and then went back to live there for a year because we had found jobs in bars. Our mum was very afraid, of course, because she was our mother, but our dad said to go for it because he always dreamed of living abroad. It wasn't working out with the two guys though so when we went back we said goodbye to them.

Gabriela and I came home after a year and I got a job in bar in Brno. . . I was never happy staying in the Czech Republic though because it was too hard to save for anything there and I had itchy feet. My friend Hana rang me in 2002 and said there was a job available to me in a small restaurant in Koblenz in Germany. It was a really bad experience though. I think I'm a friendly person and I can talk to anybody, but I hope I never meet the people I worked for there again. They weren't nice to me and their attitude was that Germans were superior to Czechs. I lost 10 kilos in the nine months that I was there through stress and it was very hard.

I left and came back to Brno again, and I had a boyfriend there, who I had been with before I went to Germany.

He decided to come to Ireland to live, as his brother had been here for 10 years, and I came over with him in 2005. We had been talking about coming to Ireland before I went to Germany actually, and I said to him at the time, "Are you mad because it is always raining and so cold there!"

When I came over to Dublin in 2005, I lived in a house in Jobstown at first and I went around with CVs to different places. I was really lucky because I found a job in The Revels pub in Rathfarnham when I was only five days here. I am still working there two years later and I just love it because the people are so nice to me.

If you need help, everyone gives it, and I would say Irish people are really friendly and nice. Even when I'm not speaking very good English, they do their best to understand me, and it's the same in shops and the bank. .

If you ask me to compare what is better at home, I would say that the weather is better, and we probably have a better choice of food. . . I think that women at home pay more attention to how they look compared to Irish women. There are beauty and nail salons everywhere in the Czech Republic, which I don't see here as much. We have more of a choice of clothes too, and when I go home, I always buy loads of clothes. . .

I'm very happy here at the moment but I miss my family big time. I love them very much and they mean everything to do me. They're coming over this week and we're going to visit Dingle because we were there before and they loved it. I'm making enough money here to do all the things I want to do, like travelling and going to the gym, and I can also save money, which is something I could never do at home. Rent is very high here though, and it's hard because you have to share all the time, and you don't really have privacy. . . I've been seeing an Irish man for the past five months and he's very nice, so I'm very happy. I met him because he was a customer in The Revels but once we started going out together, I told him he'd have to stop drinking there!

I've been to Donegal, Kerry and Galway and it was so green and lovely, compared with the Czech Republic, which is much more built up and heavily populated. I'm happy to stay here in Dublin, because I just think that the Irish are great people and you have such a beautiful country.