ActiveRecord Slow Object Instantiation

I maintain a website of events taking place in my city.

My website homepage is a 5-days calendar with all the events taking place from today to 4 days in the future.

I have done quite a good job with my "ActiveRecord" code as I have around ~120ms spent in MySQL (double checked with RackMiniProfiler) to load ~200-300 events.

However my response time is very slow (1.5s - 2s).

Most time is spent in instantiation of AR's objects from my queries

Using ObjectSpace, I see that ~6k AR::Base objects are instantiated for +300 events that are displayed.

The reason why there are so many objects is that my Event model has many associated models (e.g. venue, occurrences, categories, etc...), all of which contain bits of information I need to show.

As expected, profiling proved ActiveRecord's object instantiation as the most consuming task during the request.

I am not experienced enough in neither ActiveRecord nor its performance.

Is such speed expected or should my objects be instantiated much faster?

Should I move away from AR and use simple ruby hashes?

Is this the Rails standard when my data model is too complex?

========================================================================= UPDATE 1 =========================================================================

This pastebin contains the service class I use to load the events for a single day in the calendar. I hope it's understandable, I did not have time to properly document it since it's still a work in progress to improve performance.