Every December, plans are made for New Year’s Eve to be ~~the~~ best night of your life – well, of the past 364 days anyway – however, like most well-laid plans, NYE often doesn’t live up to the epically high hopes you had for it. To give you the best possible chance of living up to that personal promise come 2015/2016, we’ve scoped the world for some of the best celebrations going.
The below spectacles are from the NYE just gone by, but if one of your resolutions was ‘be more prepared than a boy and/or girl scout’, use them to start mapping out how plan to make the most of December 31st, 2015.
SYDNEY
Starting off local, nothing else beats the Sydney Harbour fireworks display for both ease of access and the most number of explosions on a bridge that don’t actually blow it up. With seven tonnes of pyrotechnics including 11,000 shells and 25,000 shooting comets, the display cost $7.2 million, which turns out to be cheaper than a happy meal. If you missed it or wanna check it out from an alternative angle, see the 360º highlights via sneaky drone c/o The Sydney NYE Telstra YouTube Show.
NEW YORK CITY
If New York City isn’t on your NYE bucket list, it damn well should be. Who wouldn’t want to ring in the new year by standing in Times Square for 10 hours in sub-zero temperatures with a million other people crammed into approx. 5 blocks with no bathroom breaks for hours just to watch a 5,400kg shiny ball slide down a pole? Sounds bloody fantastic.
Tbh for an ideal NYE in NYC you’re best just heading anywhere else in the city – vibe and parties abound throughout! – and just watching the ball drop remotely.
BERLIN
If you’re a lover of the firework and are keen to lose a hand, try your hand at creating your own lil’ display, Berlin is the city for you. It is 100% legal to buy and let off fireworks (as long as they’re German made – national spirit, yo!) and tradition/insanity has it that you just go to the side of the road and fire them whenever and wherever the fuck you want. An exhilarating way to kick off the new year, potentially sans a limb.
Weird tradition: Get a little ball of molten lead, pour it in a bowl of water and read the resulting pattern. It’s like divining tea leaves, only ingesting this one could kill you. Fun!
RIO DE JANEIRO
Copacabana
Beach is where you want to be if your new year’s resolution is to master stand-up paddleboard yoga whilst watching fireworks. More than a million people turned up this year to sip on a coconut and catch the seaside fireworks which marked the city’s 450th birthday.
Weird tradition: For good luck, jump seven waves and offer up gifts to the water
goddess Lemanja by throwing them in the ocean. If they come back, she
thinks you suck at gift-giving and your year might not be so great.
via Mario Tama/Getty Images
DUBAI
Having broken the world record the previous year for the biggest fireworks display since The Big Bang wiped out the dinosaurs, Dubai had a lot to live up to this time around. Launching about a bajillion firey objects from the Burj Khalifa – which stands at a record 827.84 metres tall – and along the United Arab Emirates’ 94-kilometre coastline they pretty much nailed it again.
MOSCOW
Perhaps the most fairytale of all, the display put on by the city of Moscow is pretty sweet considering the fireworks light up the likes of Lenin’s mausoleum, the Kremlin, Kazan Cathedral and Saint Basil’s Cathedral. It’s so magical, you’d think you were a long-lost Disney princess coming home.
Weird tradition: Write down a wish on a piece of paper, burn it, pop the ashes in your champagne glass and scull it all before 12:01am.
via Dmitry Serebryakov/AFP/Getty Images
BARCELONA
For the second year in a row, the Spanish kicked off the new year with a 15 metre tall ‘Millennium Being’. Because apparently a iron-skeletoned giant filled with a hundred humans is the best way to celebrate the coming year. Plus, they had a magic fountain.
Weird tradition: Eat a grape for each of the 12 strikes of the clock at midnight to encourage a year of prosperity.
Title image by James Ambrose
