It’s now the biggest annual event in Sydney apart from the New Year’s Eve fireworks and includes so many performances, music events and parties that it’s impossible to see them all. A good place to start is the free Festival launch (Feb 11, 8.15pm) on the Sydney Opera House forecourt, which offers a grab bag of teasers of things to come, plus music, refreshments and a dance party to finish. The Parade (Mar 4, 8pm) is the highlight, of course - a time when gay politics and sheer fun collide.

The annual summer ‘festa major’ in Gràcia’s is one of the biggest street parties in Barcelona, with numerous live bands playing on different squares and streets and masses of people making merry. Held every August since the 1820s, the festival seems to get bigger and better each year. Different streets compete with each other to design the most outrageous decoration and the results can range from tropical islands to satirical takes on popular events. Food and drink, as well as music, are abundantly available on each street and on the last night of the festival fireworks are set off.

As a founder of COBRA, the late-1940s movement involving artists based in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, Liège-born Corneille (real name: Guillaume van Beverloo) became identified with bold experimentalism. Featuring 35 of his works in several media, this exhibition shows him using garish colours to engage in a bizarre exploration of the links between sex and nature. Most of the paintings here date from the 1990s, proving that the 77-year-old has a creative vigour that many younger artists would envy.

Love ‘em, hate ‘em, bartenders have played a variety of roles in our lives. They’ve been friend, confidant and psychotherapist. Your local bartender has helped you impress a date and has seen you at your drunken worst. As long as you’re buying, he/she is always there to listen. In his one-man show, Louis Mustillo examines the bar life and the people who work in them.

Bizet’s exotic romance is as much a visual experience as an aural one, full of striking images of a ruined eastern temple at sunset, an unknown veiled woman approaching in a canoe and a mysterious assignation on a steep cliff. This new production is conducted by Richard Bonynge - internationally recognised as a master of 19th-century French repertoire - and stars Lisa Russell as the young temple maiden and David Miller and Michael Lewis as the two men in conflict for her love.

He’s been arrested on weapons charges, (allegedly) punched Boyzone upstart Shane Lynch and lost friends through gangsta killings. Is there anything tame about Seán ‘Puffy’ Combs? Yes, his music. Puff Daddy is the Val Doonican of hip hop, serving the antithesis of Public Enemy’s urgent and angry beats. This is the man, after all, who made Sting’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ sound more mawkish than the original. There is, however, one good reason to attend this concert: the remote possibility that his drop-dead-gorgeous girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, might be in the audience.

At last a well-themed and reasonably-priced new bar/restaurant open all night in downtown Budapest! The Resti, its furniture and décor taken from the Communist era, is a welcome addition to city-centre eateries, with a full menu served until 6am daily (main courses around £4); it has a small café upstairs, and a corner of the spacious downstairs area done up like a 1950s’ living room, radio, newspapers and all. In a quiet street off main Vorosmarty ter.

French dance rockers Rinocerose mix acoustic guitar tracks ranging from flamenco to funk with ambient and atmospheric background sounds to wondrous effect. The husband-and-wife team Patou and Jean Phillipe Freu, both practising psychologists, are delightfully free of the usual club music influences, as is the Palac Akropolis club, where this show is likely to draw an exuberant crowd.