We just got a look at Rough Guides’ tome of a coffee table book Make the Most of Your Time on Earth. In addition to sporting a bit of a foreboding title, Make the Most is bursting at the seams with event and activity suggestions around the world. Looking at the compendium’s European offerings, we were pleased to see, in no particular order, the following trip suggestions: Pembrokeshire hikes; Scottish Highland Games; surfing in Tarifa; mountain walks in Madeira; taking the Lake Mývatn waters; overeating in Bologna; and bunker spotting in Durrës.

You get the picture. Make the Most is glossy and packed with trip suggestions as well as listings-driven “Miscellany” section at the close of each chapter. Just don’t plan to take it with you when you travel. It weighs approximately three tons.

We suggest taking a look at KLM’s current “Break Away” fare promotion.

It offers decent roundtrip fares between Amsterdam and several European cities: Birmingham, Edinburgh, Geneva, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Manchester, Marseille, Milan, and Paris. The cheapest listed Break Away fare is Amsterdam-Paris, which begins at €147. Afraid of fare creep via undisclosed fees and taxes? Don’t be. These fares include all additional charges.

In most cases, Break Away promotional fares last through November.

CSA Czech Airlines has just launched Click4Sky, a new, independently branded initiative designed to fill empty seats on Czech Airlines flights. The upfront basics look promising. The site itself is clean and light and direct, as all low-cost airline sites should be. (A heavy, busy low-cost carrier site, after all, screams Hidden Costs! Scams! Fear!)

Aesthetics and others dangers aside, Click4Sky charges CZK 1990 (€72; $102) for a one-way journey, taxes and fees included. In actuality, the CZK 1990 assertion is a bit slippery, as only roundtrip tickets can be purchased. So figure CZK 3980 (€144; $204) per ticket.

There’s something pleasing about a set fare, as it completely eliminates guesswork, fare hunting, and, well, all attempts to divine future fares. Also pleasing is the fact that all Click4Sky seats are on regular Czech Airlines airplanes, with free drinks and gratis newspapers.

Downside? Despite a wide-ranging destination map, which includes decent Central and Eastern European coverage (Athens, Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Istanbul, Košice, Krakow, Ljubljana, Prague, Riga, Tallinn, Thessaloniki, Vienna, and Vilnius), one destination outside of Europe (Cairo), very good coverage of Germany (eight destinations), and Oslo, among other destinations, all flights are routed through Prague.

For Prague area residents and for visitors planning to base a long-term holiday in Prague, Click4Sky is a great deal. For average travelers, however, its utility is somewhat limited. We’d love to see Click4Sky sell one-way flights and thereby make these low fares more accessible to run-of-the-mill tourists.

Cultural assets are things to cherish. Scan the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and it will be clear that Europe bristles with treasures: from the cultural landscapes of the high valleys of Andorra to the wooden churches of northern Romania. Michelangelo paintings and Gothic cathedrals are self-evidently worth hanging onto. Yet some of Europe’s most important cultural assets are utterly intangible.

Take language, an asset we too often take for granted. Most Europeans somehow learn to get by in one or two other languages beyond their mother tongue. And occasionally we run across folk on our travels who have not had the chance to practice, still less to perfect, another language and remain sadly monolingual. Plus of course a fair number of diehards who elect to remain assertively and stubbornly monolingual for one reason or another.

Europe’s rich diversity of languages captures the media spotlight this week with the European Day of Languages (EDL). Officially slated for Wednesday but celebrated earlier in the week in some countries, EDL is an initiative of the Council of Europe and will be marked in the Council’s forty-seven member states.

Language is a wonderful thing. So why not celebrate the European Day of Languages by getting your tongue round a few pharyngeal fricatives and then check out some of Europe’s threatened minority languages? These are cultural assets on the brink. Mirandesa, Kashubian, and Sorbian are just three of the many we’ve come across over the past year—in Portugal, Poland, and Germany respectively.

This is the second in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

We didn’t really think we’d make it through this week. Here’s our Friday list.

1. The most significant event we’ve come across in Europe’s low-cost air world this week is today’s news that Air Berlin is set to purchase Condor. Thomas Cook, which currently owns most of Condor, will be selling the airline to Air Berlin in return for an almost 30 percent stake in the expanded airline, plus €120 million. It still might not happen if Condor minority stakeholder Lufthansa decides to oppose the purchase.

2. We will be visiting Amsterdam in a few weeks and we’re already excited about frites with peanut sauce, Surinamese spicy chicken, and pisang goreng. Our advance research just turned up D’Vijff Vlieghen, which looks like a splurgeworthy place to sample “New Dutch” cuisine.

3. We have it on good authority that Ryanair is trying to muscle its way into Schiphol, and furthermore is considering route expansions to destinations in Tunisia, Croatia, Serbia, and Ukraine.

4. The Guardian delights with this piece on the UK’s top ten pub roasts. We like the looks of The Druid Inn in Goginan, Aberystwyth, Wales.

Today, Polish-Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air announced route expansions in and out of its Gdansk base.

From mid-March, frequency on routes to Dortmund, Liverpool, London Luton, Lübeck, and Stockholm Skavsta will increase, and three brand-new routes will commence: Gdansk-Bournemouth, Gdansk-Coventry, and Gdansk-Gothenburg.

Wizz Air operates six bases in Central and Eastern Europe, and is the leading low-cost carrier in Eastern Europe.

Today Ryanair announced three new routes. Two (Cork-East Midlands and Cork-Glasgow) will kick off on December 13. The third will run between Malta and Treviso near Venice. The airline doesn’t offer an official starting date for the Malta-Treviso route, though we found a €.01 fare in early January.

The kicker? That eurocent balloons to €47.13 once taxes are taken into account.

Iceland Express, our favorite Icelandic low-cost carrier—ok, the only low-cost carrier in Iceland—is running a quick low fare promotional sale right now. From Wednesday, September 19 through Friday, September 21 (noon GMT in both instances), Iceland Express is hawking one-way fares between Reykjavík and its menu of low season destinations. These include London, Barcelona, Alicante, Luxembourg, Friedrichshafen, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Billund.

Travel period is October 1 through November 30. Fares begin at £45, €65, DKK 485, SEK 605, and NOK 510, and include taxes and charges.

Recently launched: MAPMagazine, an online publication that devotes itself to Madrid’s Anglophone expats and visitors. The magazine, which feels to us like a cross between the NYT and Facebook, is a useful compendium of news and calendar items. There are lists of free (and cheap) things to do, restaurant reviews, and coverage of the capital’s nightlife scene.

We’re impressed by the breadth of material covered and by the absence of snarky expat snivel. You know what we’re talking about. So if you’re hankering for it, go elsewhere.

1. Ryanair has put together something it’s calling the “Malpensa Manifesto,” a plan to increase investment in Milan-area airports and launch 50 international and ten domestic routes from Milan Malpensa.

2. We’ve been mesmerized by the launch of Porter, the superstylish new Canadian airline. With just four routes in eastern Canada—and a Newark-Toronto link in the works—Porter makes small scale look very, very appealing. It’s got a clean and crisp brand, a fab in-flight magazine, and a base at the very central Toronto City Centre Airport. OK, so Canada is a fair jump from Europe (and Porter isn’t exactly a low-cost carrier) but still. Check it out.

3. Jet2’s in expansion mode. In May 2008 the UK low-cost carrier will launch routes between Leeds Bradford and Avingon, Heraklion, Jersey, La Rochelle, Lübeck, Madrid, Olbia, and Paphos.