NEW YORK -- Visitors crowded into Times Square on Friday for the storied New Year's Eve ball drop, the largest of many events across the country planned to usher in 2011.
Across the globe, dazzling fireworks lit up Australia's Sydney Harbor, communist Vietnam held a rare Western-style countdown to the new year, and Japanese revelers released balloons carrying notes with people's hopes and dreams.
In New York, as many as 1 million people were expected for the Times Square celebration. The city is still digging out from a debilitating Dec. 26 blizzard that dumped 20 inches of snow on streets that still haven't been entirely cleared. Security in Times Square was tight just eight months after a Pakistani immigrant attempted to detonate a car bomb there.
In Chicago, unseasonably warm temperatures that reached the 50s during the day helped draw a robust crowd to Navy Pier for two fireworks shows.
Tens of thousands gathered in Southern California for Rose Bowl pep rallies in Pasadena and at the historic Santa Monica Pier.
In Las Vegas, where temperatures were dipping to the high 20s, nearly 320,000 partiers hit the famed Strip, with celebrity musicians Jay-Z and Coldplay performing a private show broadcast to the street from the marquee of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas casino. Other warm and party-friendly cities like New Orleans, Miami and Atlanta also hosted large celebrations.
In Europe, Greeks, Irish and Spaniards began partying through the night to help put a year of economic woe behind them.
Around 50,000 people, many sporting large, brightly colored wigs, gathered in Madrid's central Puerta del Sol square to take part in Las Uvas, or The Grapes, a tradition in which people eat a grape for each of the 12 chimes of midnight. Chewing and swallowing the grapes to each tolling of a bell is supposed to bring good luck, while cheating is frowned on and revelers believe it brings misfortune.
"If you eat the grapes your wishes will come true," beautician Anita Vargas said.
As the 12th grape was swallowed, the skies above most Spanish cities lit up with fireworks.
2010 was a grim year for the European Union, with Greece and Ireland needing bailouts, and countries such as Spain and Portugal finding themselves in financial trouble as well.
"Before, we used to go out, celebrate in a restaurant, but the last two years we have had to stay at home," said Madrid florist Ernestina Blasco, whose husband, a construction worker, is out of work.
In Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, an estimated 55,000 people packed a square in front of the city's elegant French colonial-style opera house for their first New Year's countdown blowout, complete with dizzying strobe lights and thumping techno music spun by international DJs.
Vietnamese typically save their biggest celebrations for Tet, the lunar new year that begins Feb. 3. But in recent years, Western influence has started seeping into Vietnamese culture among teens, who have no memory of war or poverty and are eager to find a new reason to party.
At Japan's Zojoji temple in Tokyo, monks chanted, and revelers marked the arrival of the new year by releasing silver balloons with notes inside. The temple's giant 15-ton bell rang in the background.
In Seoul, South Korea, more than 80,000 people celebrated by watching a traditional bell-ringing ceremony and fireworks, while North Korea on Saturday welcomed the new year with a push for better ties with its neighbor, warning that war "will bring nothing but a nuclear holocaust."
(source:star-telegram.com)
