Photograph by Wayne Zakaria

Berlin will host a huge European Union birthday bash this weekend as it celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome with a mixture of politics and a bonanza of Cheapo entertainment.

While European leaders sign the Berlin Declaration on European Values, museum lovers can attend the “Night of Beauty” on March 24. One €14 ticket gets you into 14 museums and galleries, which will stay open until 2 a.m. and feature special exhibitions and performances.

Those who want to keep going all night can play at more than 30 Berlin bars and clubs, where DJs and musical acts from across Europe will be entertaining partygoers. €12 gets you a ticket into all participating clubs.

On March 25, things get really cheap—free, in fact—with an outdoor concert at the Brandenburg Gate, starting at noon and lasting into the night. Acts include the Blue Man Group and Joe Cocker.

Berlin proved its party-throwing prowess with the World Cup last summer, and we expect nothing less than a wunderbar celebration. Prost!

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We got a good injection of artistic inspiration at the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street Annexe in Athens (Pireos Street 138 at Andronikou Street, tel: +30-210-345-3111). There, one of the current exhibitions is a collection of selected sculptures and paintings by contemporary Greek artist Kostas Paniaras. The exhibition spans Paniaras’s first 50 years of art work. It’s a “non-retrospective” review, with current work and past work juxtaposed side-by-side. This organization jumbles the traditional narrative of an artist’s progression, and makes Paniaras’s work feel truly alive across the decades of his work.

While you can pay €8 for admittance to all of the museum’s fabulous exhibits, you can opt to experience the Paniaras exhibition for only €3. If you have a child under 18 with you, the child attends free and you are admitted for €1.50.

This exhibit only runs through March 18, so hurry! (The museum is open from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday, 10 a.m. until 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and closed Monday and Tuesday.)

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photograph by Melanie Clatanoff

If you’re in Paris and starved for some English language press, don’t pay €2.20 for a newspaper.

The Museum of Parisian Architecture, located in the Pavillion de l’Arsenal, has a “bar à journaux” where anyone can sit and read the news for free. The International Herald Tribune is there, along with thirteen other daily papers from around the world. There’s even a vending machine for coffee.

The museum is also free, so take a look around! It just reopened this week following a renovation. It has cool models, maps, and drawings of Paris through the ages and bean bag chairs to lounge in. If you don’t know much about Paris this is a great place to get an overview of the city and start planning your visit!

The Pavillion de l’Arsenal is open 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Sundays. It’s located at 21 boulevard Morland in the 4th arrondissement. The closest metro is Sully-Morland, line 7, though Bastille is also nearby.

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photograph by Melanie Clatanoff

Museums in Paris are free on the first Sunday of the month. So now that you have absolutely no excuse not to soak in a little culture, where to go?

We suggest avoiding the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, where there will be a herd of about six thousand fellow Cheapos standing in line.

Try the Picasso Museum. The museum is in a huge 17th century mansion, tucked away on a little backstreet in the 3rd arrondissement. It’s one of the best (and least-crowded!) museums in Paris.

The museum is located in the Marais, which is a great weekend neighborhood to begin with. While the rest of Paris shuts down on Sundays, the Marais keeps going. You can grab some falafel and even go shopping post-Pablo.

Located at 5 rue de Thoringy, metro Saint Paul (line 1), open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

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photograph courtesy of mike_nl

There is only one thing we Cheapos like better than getting something for cheap, and that’s getting something for free. In Berlin every Thursday evening, you can get something priceless for free: entrance to the city’s world-renowned museums.

Every Thursday for four hours before closing time, entrance to all the permanent exhibitions at Berlin’s state museums won’t cost you a cent. Some of the museums have opening hours extended until 10 p.m. on Thursdays as well, giving you plenty of time to take advantage of this deal.

The famous Ishtar Gate from ancient Babylon at the Pergamon Museum? Free!

The original bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti at the Altes Museum? Free!

Helmut Newton’s photos at the Museum for Photography? Free!

Looking for something a little lighter? We recommend the Museum of Decorative Arts for a look at everyday design over the ages.

You get the idea. Now go get some culture.

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photograph courtesy of Don_Gru

Lots of cities offer discount cards or city passes that aren’t up to snuff. Not so in Vienna, where the 72-hour Vienna Card, priced at €18.50, is an unambiguously great deal.

So what can this card do for you? First off, it’s a great deal for the transportation benefit alone. A single ticket with return option costs €3, so the card really goes a long way for tourists on the move. (And, incidentally, if you’ve ever witnessed Vienna’s ticket control officers sweeping through trams and U-Bahn cars, you’ll never want to ride in the city without a paid fare again.)

The Vienna Card is great for culture vultures. If museums and historical sights are your game, you’re in luck. Vienna Card holders are entitled up to 50 per cent reductions at 210 museums and sights, theaters and concerts. The card even offers discounts at shops, restaurants, coffeehouses, and Heurigen (wine taverns). The Vienna Card comes with a booklet detailing the the 210 sights and offering all sorts of advice.

The Vienna Card can be purchased at, among other locations, many hotels and hostels, the Tourist Information Center on Albertinaplatz, (open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day), the information booths of the Stephansplatz and Karlsplatz U-Bahn stations, the Südbahnhof in the Fourth District, and the Landstrasse/Wien Mitte station.

Those outside of Austria should dial 43-1-798-4400-148 to purchase a Vienna Card. There’s also the nifty option of ordering it online.

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How would you like the coming spring this year? We are betting our noses for mild and sunny weather. And, as ever, we are also hoping for more eroticism.

Happily for us, the classy BA-CA Kunstforum in Vienna opens “Eros in Modern Art” tomorrow, March 1, 2007. The exhibition runs through July 22. “Eros” foregrounds the knotty and central theme in the arts: eroticism.

The show attempts to popularize a sense of eroticism that doesn’t revert exclusively to matters of sex and the body. The exhibition’s more expansive objective is—in the museum’s own words—to open up the field of eroticism to “the erotic sphere of temptation and union, of desire and longing, dream and the subconscious in a great variety of forms.” Gulp.

Expect an all-star cast of around 35 artists, from the late 19th century through the present. Visitors will find the works of Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Paul Gauguin, Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse, Bettina Rheims, Auguste Rodin, and Egon Schiele included.

BA-CA Kunstforum is located at Freyung 8 in the First District. It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (until 9 p.m. on Fridays.) Adults are admitted for €8.70, with discounts available for students, seniors, children, and groups.

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photograph courtesy of Kaymaria Daskarolis

The extensive collections of the Benaki Museum (on the corner of Vassilissis Sofias Avenue and Koumbari Street in the Kolonaki neighborhood of Athens) cover a variety of subjects—from ancient pottery and regional dress to elaborate icons and the actual constitution of the modern Greek state.

Every Thursday, from 9 a.m. to midnight, visitors can explore the Benaki Museum for free. On the other six days of the week, admission is €6 per person—still quite a bargain. The Benaki Museum also offers several discounts on admission. Check the museum’s site for details.

The Benaki Museum is also a wonderful place to take kids, especially if you buy them Eleni Geroulanou’s book, “The Alphabet Book of the Benaki Museum” which is sold for €15 in the museum store. Written in Greek, it highlights objects on display in the Benaki Museum beginning with each letter of the Greek alphabet. The fun part is exploring the museum in search of each item—a brilliant and exciting treasure hunt for all ages!

The current temporary exhibit, (English title: “The Journey: The Greek American Dream“) runs through Sunday, February 25, 2007.

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photograph courtesy of purplepunk

For those on the hunt for a good cultural bargain, the Nuit des Musees in Paris can’t be beat. If you’re not familiar with it (yet), here’s the key info. In 2005, the French Department of Culture launched this program to provide free admission to select museums in Paris and throughout France, keeping museum doors open until 1 a.m.

The development of free museum nights has really taken off across Europe, with city after city opening their doors once or twice a year for a free evening. Paris holds its free night each year in May.

One caveat, though: We tried getting into the Louvre at midnight during last year’s Nuit des Musees only to find the entrance closed at 11 p.m.

Our advice: Plan ahead. Fortunately, the Louvre’s terrace bar overlooks the pyramids. And, of course, there’s the adjacent Jardin des Tuilleries, with its much more hospitable hours.

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