The Best Events Of The Year

From a gourmet festival on the beach to the world's biggest beer bender, these gatherings offer good times like no others.

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."

In Pictures: The Best Events Of The Year

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. Carnival in Rio de Janeiro is four concentrated days of insane costumes, dancing and debauchery. It is the largest Carnival in the world, running this year from March 5 to 8, attracting millions of Brazilians and an estimated half-million foreign visitors every year.