Getting ready for Ayacucho! Yay!

Hey everyone!
So this is going to be a very quick blog entry because I am sort of in a hurry and out of small pocket change to pay for the internet cafe. (It´s funny really, I only consider my pocket change as how much money I have. What´s in my wallet is often useless since only restaurants are willing to take my 50 soles bills. Even handing a 20 soles bill to a cab driver will make him grunt and moan in dissaproval). But, I just wanted to give an update. I got invited to a conference in Ayacucho--a nice little town in the central highlands of Peru--on what is called Intercultural Health here. It´s a new term that seems to only exist in Latin America as far as I can tell, but it means that they are trying to develop a relationship between Western health practices and indigenous health practices, thus making a new intercultural health system. The idea is relatively new still. In fact, there is technically no official definition yet, and people in the ministry told me they will e-mail me when they finally decide on one. Either way, they are making a whole conference about this undefined term in Ayacucho and I am so excited that I will be there. Plus, it looks like Ayacucho is a nice town. The architecture is supposed to be beautiful and it has the dubious record of having the most churches per square meter! (I´ve heard people saying that there is a total of 300 at least in the whole town...in other words, one per block!!). Not surprisingly, one of the more popular exports are beautiful palm-sized wooden churches made by craftsmen. Apparently, they will also weave a personalize rug made from real Llama wool at your request as well, apparently usually depicting some of the more painful history of struggle in Ayacucho. (At $300, as tempted as I might be, I think I will pass...but the idea is cool. The whole process also takes 3 months, so you´d have to get it DHLed home.)
So, I will be leaving on a tiny plane tomorrow morning (Friday 15) and coming back apparently on an even tinier plane on monday. This should be interesting! Eek. I am sure it will be fine though. The flight is only one hour. I should be pretty comfy as there won´t be a lot of people in the plane because this is not the high season for tourism at all for Ayacucho. That would be actually in "Semana Santa" (big surprise, considering the number of churches), where people need to book hotels days in advance. Currently, from what I read and have been told, there are so many open hostels and hotels in the area that no one bothers to book in advance. Apparently, this is the classic case of a town over-compensating for really high, short lived seasons. Competition must be hard right now for the poor hotels, I like to wonder how they mantain themselves out of peak season. But on the plus side for the tourist, accomodations are really cheap and nice, since they want to attract the most tourists *beams*
Alright I gotta go right now. I think I went over the pocket change I had. The manager won´t be too happy, I think he is going to have to give me change. *blushes* I´ll write again later, and I will try to write more consistently. I was pretty busy this week and barely had time to answer my e-mail every day!

Chao!