Best Place To Be with Baz Ashmawy
6×30 for RTÉ One and RTÉ Player
Tuesdays at 7pm from October 17 2023
In this new series for RTÉ One, Baz Ashmawy travels across Europe meeting Irish people who have uprooted the lives they had in Ireland to make a home elsewhere.
Over the six episodes he meets a variety of Irish people who have made a new home abroad and gets the lowdown on their new country when it comes to how they live, work and play.
On his travels, Baz visits Spain, Norway, Italy, France, Hungary, and Germany. In each place, he spends time with Irish people learning about their lives, finding out why, for them, it’s the Best Place To Be.
Baz soaks up the sun in Spain, where he meets a married couple originally from Roscommon who have reinvented themselves as boutique hoteliers in Spain. While there he also catches up with an event designer and stylist from Dublin who is in the early days of setting up a business in Barcelona.
Onto Norway, where he visits a woman from Limerick who has been living in Oslo for almost thirty years, and a young woman from Dublin who has just begun making a life there.
While in Turin in northern Italy, Baz spends time with a host of young people in their twenties who are enjoying what Italy has to offer them as a home compared to their lives in Ireland.
Baz is put to work in rural France helping on a farm where he meets a couple from Galway; and he works a service in a restaurant owned and run by a brother and sister from Cork.
Next stop, Hungary where Baz hangs out in Budapest with a guy from Donegal and his Hungarian boyfriend who run a perfume shop in the city, before visiting a rural part of the country to meet an artist from Dublin and her Hungarian family.
Baz wraps up his European tour in Berlin, the capital city of Germany, where he gets an insight in the restaurant and food scene there by spending time with chefs from Limerick and Dublin, and shopkeeping in a grocery store.
How many of us wonder what it’s like to live abroad, and if it is it all it’s cracked up to be? In this new series Baz Ashmawy will give viewers an insight into what it’s like for Irish people living in the rest of Europe, providing lots of fun and laughs along the way.
EPISODE ONE- Spain
In the first episode of this six part series Baz Ashmawy travels to Spain where he meets hotelier couple Joan and John Gallagher originally from Roscommon and events designer and stylist Róisín Moloney from Dublin.
Joan and John Gallager, in their sixties, left Boyle in Roscommon twenty two years ago, with their four young sons, to set up a life in Sitges, Spain. There they made a living by renovating and renting properties, and teaching english. Just recently, again they’ve reinvented themselves, this time as hoteliers opening a boutique aparthotel in the Tarragona region of Spain where they have become very much part of the local community. On the flip side, forty year old Róisín Moloney from Dublin is recently living in Barcelona, where she has opened an event design and styling company and is navigating all the challenges that setting up a business in a new country brings.
