One Year Until Expo 2008

Yesterday marked the "one year to go" mark until Expo 2008. Given the difficulty I've found in past years finding hotels during world's fairs, I'm going to try to start booking a room soon since most hotels don't allow reservations until one year before a date.

Also, I won't be making the mistake I made in 2005 and go the last couple of weeks. It seems that people all over the world share one universal trait: procrastination. If you look at attendance figures of world's fairs, there's always a huge spike right at the end.

Given the new timing of expositions (a big one every five years with a small one in between two big ones... but not in an adjacent year) and given that all three cities bidding for the 2012-2013 slot have chosen 2012, we'll have three expositions in the next five years! We won't have two back-to-back non-expo years until 2013-2014!

It's clear that excitement is building worldwide for expositions. In 2012, we might have our first Polish expo (in Wroclaw) or our first African expo (in Tangier, Morocco). In 2012 or 2015. We could have our first world's fair in an Islamic country in either Tangier (2012) or Izmir, Turkey (2015).

Notably Absent from the list of planned and potential future expos are any in the Western Hemisphere. The last exposition held in the Western Hemisphere was Expo 86 in Vancouver. With the next slot available for bidding being 2017-2018, we'll see at least a 31 year gap in North American world's fairs, very shocking given the strong history of international expositions in the United States particularly.

Let's hope the United States, Canada, or Mexico picks up the torch for 2017, 2018, or 2020