Ask Lemmy

Every city has free activities that happen from time to time. There are guides on entertainment online and in paper that will tell you what they are and when they will occur. For example, there is a spanish culture center where I live, and I've taken my kid there several times for free shows.

Going on walks in the city to take in the architecture is free. If you have a phone, you can try to improve your photography skills by taking pictures of things you see that are interesting.

There are places that are made for public well being that are free; like Museums and libraries. You can go to them to enrich yourself and learn new things, or even just see the artifacts (or replicas) you've learned about elsewhere.

As others have noted : parks and the like are free for the public to access. You can have fun being in a green space and in nature.

Meetups are organised online for free, for various hobbies in public spaces, sometimes even in pubs/restaurants/bars, or even specialist stores. Usually the proprietors won't mind if one or two people are not spending money if there is a large group there that is spending money.

By the way, for non-city folk, these things also apply to you. When I was living in a smaller town with population about 60k , I saw jazz performances, fun architecture and walked around in public forests and "meadows" for free.

For example, time out has a page dedicated to free things to do in London this week:

https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/free-things-to-do-in-london-this-week

There are other locations available just through timeout, and meetups has things that cater to your individual tastes, and I'm sure your local metropolitan authority has a page dedicated to publically funded events I'm sure they want people to attend, and are probably free because they are paid for with taxes.

For example, I went to two official US Cities sites....

San francisco :

https://www.sf.gov/latino-heritage-month There's events listed here (some already finished) that you can attend for Latino Heritage month, it was on the homepage at sf.gov

https://www.sf.gov/topics--things-to-do-san-francisco more lists of things to do, which led me to :

https://sf.funcheap.com/free-events/ A bunch of free (some require early RSVPing) events you can enjoy in SF.

New York :

https://www.nyc.gov/main/events/?categories=Free

Here's a bunch of free stuff you can do... although the NYC stuff is a lot more... serious than the SF one, just ignore all the "Special Waste Drop-Off" events.

If you want to know more, just reply. I love living in big cities and I usually don't spend that much money there to have fun either. For most of my holidays, I literally just stay in my home city and walk around or have fun at home.