According to the Canadian Press, hosting a G20 summit means 10,000 hotel rooms in your city or region will be rented to dignitaries, functionaries, media members and protesters from around the world.
That struck the dispassionately neutral side of my brain as an interesting fact; an astounding one, even.
But if your home happens to be in the west end of Toronto and your wedding is happening in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood on Friday, June 25, 2010, the fact that some 10,000 people are wheeling their suitcases through Pearson International Airport for a G20 summit on the weekend of June 26 and 27 — with the meetings being held at a convention centre located between where your home is and where your wedding is — ceases to be a source of abstract interest and becomes instead a horrible nightmare of a thing that you must avoid thinking too much about lest it send you into a planning panic.
The last weekend in June had our white wedding flag planted on it long before the Prime Minister went ahead and announced that he was inviting Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Silvio Berlusconi and the rest of the gang into town for a couple of days. (Well, I think heads of state are coming. I’m not entirely clear on that yet.)
Inconveniences will happen. I have visions of traffic, and streets blocked for security reasons; protests; crowds; maybe terrorism rumours. All of the things that make certain friends and relatives dislike or even fear Toronto will suddenly become temporarily worse at precisely the wrong time for us. (The bustle could also conceivably make the place seem incredibly exciting.)
While it is unlikely that my fiancée’s favourite uncle was going to book the exact same hotel suite as, say, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, there will be a squeeze on accommodations and not everyone will score a bed. All we can do is send out the message to our guests to try to book now, before the rooms are all gone.
What worries me most about this situation is people not getting reservations and then either deciding not to come or trying to double up with people who have booked rooms, who of course won’t want extra guests crashing with them.
I foresee complicated negotiations happening in more than one part of town during our wedding weekend. While Obama and Harper talk trade, this groom and his bride will inevitably get dragged into discussions about who ought to sleep on whose cot. Wonderful.
Image courtesy of Nicolai Grui on flickr
