19th December 2007

Austria (dpa) - "I am on maternity leave now, but I work in Slovakia," she said, as she cleaned her sunlit kitchen dressed in a red T-shirt adorned with a white image of Bratislava castle.

The 38-year-old mother of two has moved to a foreign country, but once she returns to work her morning commute will take 15 minutes at most. It will be faster than taking public transport from her previous home on the outskirts of Bratislava outskirts.

When the Iron Curtain between the then Czechoslovakia and Austria tumbled 18 years ago, residents of the grey, run-down and impoverished Bratislava crossed the nearby border, just 7 kilometres away, in search of jobs and western goods in better-off Austria.

Now the Slovaks are scouting Austria's border region in search of land or houses, which are substantially cheaper here than in booming Bratislava.

Three years ago Miriam's Slovak-Canadian husband Daniel Soska, 39, a regional sales director in a telecoms company, was one of them.

"If we wanted to have the same land 7 kilometres from downtown Bratislava on the Slovak side we would have to pay at least four times more per square metre," he said.

Some 50 Slovaks have settled in Wolfsthal in the past five years and many more wish they could do so, the village's mayor Gerhard Schoedinger said.

"Slovaks buy every house that is for sale. It's superb. It is great for us," the mayor said. Whatever appears on the market sells within days and land prices have nearly tripled, reaching 100 euros (147 dollars) per square metre, in the past two years, he added.

Slovak newcomers are gradually turning a sleepy border outpost, whose main street is dotted with tidy blue, orange and green houses, into a cosmopolitan suburb. German, Slovak, Hungarian and English were all spoken at a recent block party, the mayor recalled.

"Each family that came is educated," Schoedinger said. "Our children are learning Slovak in kindergarten. It is very important for us that they develop a flair for the language, a feel for Slovakia."

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