The insanity of what's billed as the World's Biggest Street Party begins in Amsterdam the night before the annual celebration of the Dutch queen's birthday. Throngs of revelers clog every town in the Netherlands, but particularly Amsterdam, where decorations in orange, the Dutch national color, hang from buildings, adorn canal boats and sit atop almost every head in a bewildering array of headgear. Music pours out of canal house windows, mugs of beer are seemingly in every hand and everywhere you look, the streets are choked with people drinking, eating and dancing.
Equal parts St. Patrick's Day (with orange substituted for green), the Fourth of July and the world's largest flea market, Queen's Day is an outdoor party like no other. "The best part of Queen's Day is actually the night before," says Dimitri Tokmetzis, a Dutch journalist working in New York. "The flea market starts at around 5 p.m. You meet your friends early, stock up on cheap beer and start looking for cool stuff to buy and fun things to do. There's always a lot of live music, cabaret, theater and games to play."
"It goes on all night long," says Tokmetzis. "In the morning, when children and their parents start arriving at the market, the last drunk people scatter home."
What are the best annual events in the world? We sought to identify 10. We've included some because they attract hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of participants. Others made the cut because of their reputation and critical acclaim. Mostly, we looked for events that are better than any other of their kind — something that provides an experience no comparable event can offer.
There are many pre-Lenten Carnival festivals, from Venice to New Orleans to Belgium, but no one celebrates excess before pious fasting better than Rio. is four concentrated days of insane costumes, dancing and debauchery. It is the largest carnival in the world, running this year from March 5-8, attracting millions of Brazilians and an estimated half-million foreign visitors every year.
If the prospect of four days of dancing, romancing and drinking seems exciting, then maybe two weeks' worth of is right down your strasse, suggests editor, Salwa Jabado.
The merrymaking, camaraderie, and liters of suds are what draw Müncheners and visitors alike," says Jabado. "Depending on the beer tent, the experience can be raucous, with a young, international party crowd, or more sedate but no less fun. Live bands get people up and dancing to everything from traditional Bavarian music to American pop."
Dancing is optional at any music festival in which indie pop stars take the stage, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an annual music festival that is as diverse, jam-packed and musically forward as in Indio, Calif.
"It's the king of American music festivals," says Jonah Weiner, a pop critic at .
"Time was, it would have been tough to imagine a single festival hosting acts like, say, the Pixies, Jay-Z, deadmau5, Radiohead, the Black Keys and Kanye, but Coachella has carved out a really influential, relatively big-tent aesthetic." This year dusty, happy music fans will pack the California desert around Indio from April 15-17 to hear acts including Kanye West, Arcade Fire and Kings of Leon.
If you've built up an appetite for sun and fine food this winter, a visit to Miami for a feast created by some of the world's best chefs may be what you need. "The Food Network's is winter's must-visit stop on the foodie circuit," says Anita Crotty, an editor for Travel Intelligence, an online hotel booking site and travel advice site. Though other food events are larger — Taste of Chicago drew an estimated 3 million people over a two-week period last summer — the South Beach festival arguably outshines them in quality, as well as location.
"It's like the NFL for the food world," says Lee Schrager, the festival's founder and executive director. "It has the greatest chefs in the world, with the greatest wine producers, on the greatest beach in the world. It's like Spring Break for chefs." The festival brings an estimated 50,000 people to Miami. Running this year from Feb. 24-27, the festival will feature Jamie Oliver and Rick Bayless, among other celebrity chefs.
So whether it's beer-fueled, has a samba rhythm, or is an opportunity to sample some of the best food in the world in one place, each one of these events merits a visit, and guarantees a time unlike any other.