The past three months have been some of the most challenging of my life, rivaling my first semester of college, when I failed all but one class. When I applied to study in Spain for a semester I had been taking Spanish language classes for the better part of a decade. I assumed five months of immersion would be the trial by fire that I needed to force me to fluency. Upon arrival and learning that Castilian Spanish wasn’t even the language used in the university I was attending, let alone the first language of most people I would meet, I realized that the semester would be more difficult than I imagined.

I’m two weeks past the halfway mark of my time in Santiago de Compostela and I’m still unsure of what I’m going to come away with when I return home. It’s not that I’m doubting my growth and experiences here, but that I haven’t figured out how I’ve grown.

In regards to learning Spanish and Galician, it’s difficult to qualify my progress because my only points of reference are the other international students here who are also speaking Spanish as a learned language. The majority of our conversations are casual, so I have no knowledge of Spanish in an academic context. It’s the complete opposite with Galician, the language in which all my classes are taught. I can understand chunks of a lecture, but I find myself lost trying to comprehend a conversation between two native speakers.

It would be ignorant to write off the non-linguistic aspects of my time here. Examples of Galician culture have been hard to find, usually tucked away in cramped basement pubs. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure I have found the cultural ties that hold the Galician people together. I’m not an outgoing person and the coldness of the general public has been uninviting. Spain holds a reputation for being full of some of the friendliest people on Earth, but it seems Galicia would rather be left out of that stereotype.

Normally I would blame my own introverted tendencies, but through my short trips to southern Spain, I’ve found most Spaniards to be incredibly welcoming. Either through the blind bullfighter showing my family around the arena without being asked, or just the simple tradition of free tapas with a drink at a bar, the south has outdone Galicia with its hospitality.

For the next two months, I think my goal needs to be to get out of this city as much as possible. Two months is a long time, too long to write off the entire region of Galicia as inhospitable, but it’s also short enough that I can’t let any more of it slip away while I try to figure out how to make my time in Europe memorable. My plan is to go back to Granada for the month between the end of classes and finals to absorb as much of sunny weather and dispositions as I can.

It’s still raining in Santiago.

My mom came around the corner of Morao Castle shouting that my dad and I would be shocked walking through the gate. I told her to stop overselling things and let us form our own opinions. However, walking through the stone arch into the courtyard, I regretted my smart-ass remark. The scene could have been painted by a historical great, with sheep grazing in the tall grass, their bells jangling in a way that would probably drive me insane if it didn’t fit so perfectly with everything else I was taking in.

My family came across Morao on our second full day touring the south of Portugal and Spain. As is the nature of my family’s vacations, there was no plan in place for the trip; we’d decide each night’s destination as we were eating breakfast or were already on the road. The Portuguese town of Morao had been no more than a convenient stop for lunch on our way into the Spanish community of Extremadura. We read that the castle was built as a lookout to protect against Spanish invasions between the 13th and 17th centuries. The structure was deserted, save the sheep, with no cautionary signage or fences of the sort one would find at a place with such historical significance in the United States.

This sort of unexpected beauty became a theme for our trip: a day or two later we planned a hike through an olive farm near Villanueva del Fresno. We found ourselves walking alongside an ambling herd of cattle, which were seemingly roaming freely on the banks of the Río Alcarrache. Calves were interspersed throughout the herd, their mothers eying us with a mixture of curiosity and caution.

After our stroll through the olive groves we drove our embarrassing caravan into town to try to find dinner. We stopped at the town’s bullfighting arena (far more common than I had thought, with one in almost every town with over a few thousand inhabitants), and found it locked up. After we took a lap around the outside, a door opened and an energetic little man invited us into the empty arena to look around. He told us that he was a former participant in bullfights as the one to open the gate, letting the bull run into the ring. He didn’t explain his milky eye, letting our imaginations run wild, coming up with whatever stories were the most exciting. My mom dubbed him “the one-eyed bullfighter,” and he’ll likely go down in fame among my family.

My brother, Oakley, and I check out the bullfighting ring in Villanueva del Fresno. I struggled with the balance between seeing bullfighting as the cruel torture of an animal for sport and preserving an ancient tradition. Photo by Raven Bradenday.The only aspect of the trip that was less than perfect was the food. We’re a family of mostly vegetarians so we had trouble finding anything but baked cod and simple omelettes. That said, the 4-euro bottles of Vinho de Alentejo certainly helped dull the disappointment.

Similarly to my trip through southern Spain with Jonah, this adventure brought many feelings of missing out. I’m currently looking at the gray, spitting skies out the train window on the way back to Santiago thinking about the vibrancy of the south. If nothing else, this will be the kick in the pants I need to take advantage of where I am, or where I’m close to, for the next two months.

My mom came around the corner of Morao Castle shouting that my dad and I would be shocked walking through the gate. I told her to stop overselling things and let us form our own opinions. However, walking through the stone arch into the courtyard, I regretted my smart-ass remark. The scene could have been painted by a historical great, with sheep grazing in the tall grass, their bells jangling in a way that would probably drive me insane if it didn’t fit so perfectly with everything else I was taking in.

My family came across Morao on our second full day touring the south of Portugal and Spain. As is the nature of my family’s vacations, there was no plan in place for the trip; we’d decide each night’s destination as we were eating breakfast or were already on the road. The Portuguese town of Morao had been no more than a convenient stop for lunch on our way into the Spanish community of Extremadura. We read that the castle was built as a lookout to protect against Spanish invasions between the 13th and 17th centuries. The structure was deserted, save the sheep, with no cautionary signage or fences of the sort one would find at a place with such historical significance in the United States.

This sort of unexpected beauty became a theme for our trip: a day or two later we planned a hike through an olive farm near Villanueva del Fresno. We found ourselves walking alongside an ambling herd of cattle, which were seemingly roaming freely on the banks of the Río Alcarrache. Calves were interspersed throughout the herd, their mothers eying us with a mixture of curiosity and caution.

After our stroll through the olive groves we drove our embarrassing caravan into town to try to find dinner. We stopped at the town’s bullfighting arena (far more common than I had thought, with one in almost every town with over a few thousand inhabitants), and found it locked up. After we took a lap around the outside, a door opened and an energetic little man invited us into the empty arena to look around. He told us that he was a former participant in bullfights as the one to open the gate, letting the bull run into the ring. He didn’t explain his milky eye, letting our imaginations run wild, coming up with whatever stories were the most exciting. My mom dubbed him “the one-eyed bullfighter,” and he’ll likely go down in fame among my family.

The only aspect of the trip that was less than perfect was the food. We’re a family of mostly vegetarians so we had trouble finding anything but baked cod and simple omelettes. That said, the 4-euro bottles of Vinho de Alentejo certainly helped dull the disappointment.

Similarly to my trip through southern Spain with Jonah, this adventure brought many feelings of missing out. I’m currently looking at the gray, spitting skies out the train window on the way back to Santiago thinking about the vibrancy of the south. If nothing else, this will be the kick in the pants I need to take advantage of where I am, or where I’m close to, for the next two months.

I just received my first Spanish tongue-lashing from a train conductor. I’m on my way to Lisbon to meet my family for the week, and I got on the train going in the wrong direction. Barely awake, running on about three hours of sleep, I confused the destination and origin of the train. It took five minutes of assurances to convince the conductor that I wasn’t a freeloader trying to enjoy as much time on the train as possible. As much as I love trains, turning a 30 minute journey into two and a half hours of sitting helplessly, hoping that the train turns around fast enough for me to make my flight isn’t how I would choose to spend my morning. We live and we learn.

This seems a fitting culmination of the two weeks since I’ve last written. I arrived back in Santiago from Jonah and my jaunt around southern Spain to find that my debit card had stopped working. I had seven euros to survive for the two days before I could have cash wired to me. While far from dire, it was a stressful enough situation to suck most of the fun out of that week.

I have my complaints, but the majority of my life here is still full of good things. I’m only so low on sleep because of an overnight basketball tournament I played on Friday. I’ve still yet to crack the key to living on a Spanish sleep schedule, even after almost three months. Spaniards may as well be living in the same time zone as Maine.

It’s only possible to find the real spirit of this city when operating on their time. I went out for drinks and tapas with my Italian roommates the other night after classes. As I was about to go home to collapse into my bed, around 11:30 p.m., (I feel like an old geezer just writing that), we found a tiny Galician pub in the basement of one of the old palaces. The pub was hosting a band of traditional Galician musicians, consisting of an accordion player, a bagpiper, a pair of violinists, a saxophonist and a percussionist. The patrons were putting on shows of Celtic step-dancing to the Gaelic music. It’s important to note that this was a Thursday night and the band didn’t start playing until close to midnight.

I’ve also spent a large chunk of the week picking classes for the fall semester, coming to terms with the end of my time here and getting dragged back to the reality of a normal college life. Last week’s update ended with me questioning my decision to study in Galicia instead of a region with more favorable weather, but I recently realized that I passed the halfway mark of this trip a week ago and I feel confident that I made no mistake. As stressful as things can get here, with the challenges of learning two new languages and verbal altercations with train conductors, this isn’t an experience I’ll likely have again.

If one were interested in a lesson in humility, I would invite them to join me in a conversation about photojournalism theory with five Spanish college students, like the one I was a part of several days ago. Despite my best efforts to nod along in the background and pretend to understand half of what they were saying, they took it upon themselves to haul me into their discussion and encourage me to contribute. The exchange started with me explaining in my unique garbled Spanish/Galician hybrid that I was an exchange student from the United States. As one of the students started enthusiastically drilling me for my biography, another interrupted and scolded him for speaking too quickly for me. I can’t say I didn’t appreciate it, but I felt like a kindergartner hanging out with the big kids for the first time.

Breaking through the language barrier in classes has been unsuccessful so far. I’ve noticed improvement in my conversation skills, but listening to a professor lecture in Spanish or Galician without context to help me understand has been nothing but frustrating. One morning, I walked the 20 minutes it takes to get to campus and the building was empty when I arrived. I assume the professor told everyone that there wouldn’t be class that day and it went completely over my head. I think that’s a good indication of my abilities. I’ve been told that classes will switch to a more interactive style after the first couple weeks, but for now I remain confused and left out.

The apartment is turning out to be less of the dream I was hoping for. I’m still impressed by the building and happy about the central location, but living in a centuries old stone building has its drawbacks, namely mold and an inability to heat it above 45 degrees. I’m getting an authentic medieval experience, hopefully without the plague.

Thankfully, my roommate situation has been only positive. I live with two Italians, Nicola and Sara, and a Bolivian named Lisandro. Nicola and Sara’s Spanish skills are close to same level as mine, which leads to exchanges that Lisandro can’t help but laugh at. As clumsy as our conversations are, I think the dynamic between the four of us is perfect for learning a new language. The Italians and I talk at a slow, understandable pace and Lisandro acts as our human dictionary.

For a city of only 96,000 people, Santiago has a wild nightlife. I can leave my apartment at midnight on any night of the week and find a packed club within 100 yards of my front door. It’s expected for people to stay out past 2 a.m. and be in class by 9 the next morning. It’s a lifestyle I’m not quite used to, being a kid from an island in Maine. Lisandro looked at me like I was crazy when I turned down his offer to go dancing at 12:30 a.m. on a Thursday night. I had already been asleep for an hour and a half and was awakened by him knocking on my door. I didn’t know it was possible to feel like a kindergartner and an old curmudgeon simultaneously.

I made it to Lisbon after spending 23 hours in transit, including a 12-hour layover in Paris Charles de Gaulle, where the Border Police wouldn’t let me leave the airport. My ticket was to Lisbon, and they didn’t trust me to come back in time for my flight. The officer assured me that I would be far more comfortable passing the time sitting in a metal chair at my gate. I was delirious by the time I boarded my flight to Lisbon.

Despite my mental state when I arrived, the city tried its best to turn things around for me. I’ve never been so charmed by a city in such a short amount of time. I spent all morning trying to get lost in the maze of colorful stucco houses and apartment blocks.

My only destination for the day was the ruins of the Convento da Ordem do Carmo (Convent of our Lady of Mount Carmel), which was suggested by my journalism professor at the University of Maine, Josh Roiland. The ruins were a Roman Catholic convent severely damaged during the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. The walls of the convent are still intact, but the roof collapsed into the interior, leaving the arches and buttresses to form a stony ribcage overhead.

I wandered down to the river and found myself in the Praca do Comercio (Commerce Square), a palace built in the late 1700s after the same earthquake. I was approached by three men, spaced out by 10 minutes, trying to sell me pot. I can’t say I wasn’t impressed by their operation; they were the friendliest people I talked to all day and the only ones who spoke English.

For dinner I found a hip burger joint with 12-euro martinis. Liquor is stupidly expensive, but the food is dirt cheap (I had a 3-euro smoked ham and parmesan baguette for lunch).

Finding the deep culture of Lisbon was frustrating. Staying in a traveler’s hostel and my lack of Portuguese made getting out of the touristy sections of town difficult. I spent some time strolling through the alleyways away from the city center, but my American vibes (my backpack and L.L. Bean hiking boots) kept most locals away.

I’m finishing this piece five hours into a nine-hour bus ride to Santiago de Compostela, where I’ll be spending my semester. The highway is lined on both sides with vineyards, the gnarled vines now dried up.

I’m just approaching the point emotionally where I don’t get weak in the knees thinking about spending five months barely speaking English. I have over five years of Spanish experience in a classroom (mostly faded into the deep recesses of my mind), but the pressure of being completely dependent on another language is enveloping. Adding to this anxiety, my classes (save for a Spanish intensive) are taught for Spanish students, with no accommodations made for foreigners. The learning curve is going to be absurd.

All that said, nothing compares to the paralyzing feeling of not being home for five months. I’ve been away for three months before, but never completely without familiar relationships. I’m not an outgoing person speaking English, and now I have to build entirely new friendships without a common language. Let’s see how this goes.

The newly released “Lady Bird” follows a high school girl’s path through her senior year of Catholic high school, including her tribulations with religion and her overbearing mother. I’m a male, was raised as an atheist and went to public school for most of my life, and have a great relationship with my mom. There aren’t many Americans who relate less to the life of Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson and I am the wrong person to be reviewing it, but nonetheless, I’ll give it my best shot.

Lady Bird, played by Saoirse Ronan, has ambitious dreams of getting out of Sacramento, Calif. to go to college on the East Coast “where culture is, like New York, or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods,” as she says during a college visit car trip with her mother. Her family lives on the self-described “wrong side of the tracks” in the lower-income section of Sacramento. Laurie Metcalf plays Lady Bird’s mother, Marion, a psychiatric nurse struggling to provide for the McPhersons after the father, Larry (Tracy Letts), is fired.

“Lady Bird” is Greta Gerwig’s second directorial gig, and by all accounts, she knocked it out of the park. This movie captures the crisis of the American teen in its rawest form, the characters are not beautified, and their inner workings are laid out graphically. Gerwig manages to cover almost every challenge a woman may face in the latter years of high school, while preserving “Lady Bird” as a single-track film. The magic of “Lady Bird” is in its normalcy. Lady Bird is one of millions of women with similar stories, including my 18-year-old sister, who is in her senior year of high school, and experiencing the same trials of getting into college. There is nothing special about the story, but it stands out as one of the most unique movies I’ve ever seen.

The cinematography does its job of placing “Lady Bird” in 2017. Many of the shots are cast in soft orange light, almost vintage. Ultimately, it’s not original, and the artistry of the filming takes a back seat to strong acting and dialogue.

Inspiration for Lady Bird’s last year of high school comes in the form of the drama club. Along with her best friend, Julie (Beanie Feldstein), she joins the club with the hopes of finding a way to entertain themselves for a lackluster year. Lady Bird falls for Danny, a sexually ambiguous Irish Catholic boy in the theater group and goes through some of the standard firsts, before falling into the rich crowd and struggling with figuring out how to deal with her newfound popularity.

“Lady Bird” is uncomfortably recognizable as a cross-section of the American teens, sometimes striking so close to home that my sister had to retract into her hoodie in embarrassment, for minutes at a time. It’s also hopeful. While the audience doesn’t know if Lady Bird will be classically successful in her life, we know that she finds peace with her beginnings in Northern California. Gerwig makes the optimism of Lady Bird’s story clear from the beginning.

I walked into “Murder on the Orient Express” with its mediocre reviews stuck in my head. Rex Reed of the New York Observer calls it “sorry, inferior, unnecessary.”  In Vulture, David Edelstein asserts that “we didn’t need another ‘Murder on the Orient Express.’” While I agree with Reed and Edelstein, I maintain that it’s worth watching, as long as you’re unfamiliar with Agatha Christie’s book of the same name.

Kenneth Branagh plays Hercule Poirot, a foppish and savant-like private detective. He unwillingly finds himself on the Orient Express, a train between Istanbul and Paris. Poirot and 13 other first class passengers are stranded when an avalanche slightly derails the train near the top of a mountain. They discover one of the other passengers, Johnny Depp’s villainous Ratchett, murdered in the middle of the night. Poirot reluctantly takes on the case and spends the remaining hour and quarter of the two hour run time interviewing everyone in his carriage.

Branagh doesn’t seem to have aspired to make a cerebral murder-mystery. “Murder on the Orient Express” follows a simple, direct chain of events, straightforward enough that I would have a hard time enjoying it on a second watch. The murder clues are set in plain sight; nothing would be better understood through viewing it again. But that’s the point. This movie is at its best when seen for the first time, without holding it to especially high standards. At it’s core, it’s really fun. It doesn’t take anything out of you to figure it out, and the beautiful Computer-Generated Images (CGI) and lavishly upholstered train can be wholly enjoyed.

There isn’t much depth to the characters, with the exception of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Mrs. Hubbard, who lets her tortured past gleam through, only recognizable when the audience knows her truth. The rest of the stars seem almost bored with the film, most notably Daisy Ridley. She seems uncommitted to her role, possibly distracted by the schedule of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” Willem Dafoe plays a racist Austrian Professor, managing to be entertaining and nonessential at the same time.

“Murder on the Orient Express” obviously mirrors Robert Zemeckis’ “Polar Express” through its fantastical computer generated mountainous landscapes and the luxurious train itself. However, the parallels go beyond the superficial. The characters have the same wide-eyed mannerisms, if the cast of “Murder” are slightly more murderous, and Poirot undergoes a similar transformation as the boy in “Polar Express.” Instead of getting older and forgetting the wonders of Christmas as child, Poirot wrestles with releasing his old compulsions as a rigid detective in the interest of preserving the humanity of his suspects.

All told, “Murder on the Orient Express” will not stand out as a memorable adaptation of a literary classic, but Branagh hits his target of making a thoughtless, fun movie. It’s absolutely unnecessary, as Reed says, but he missed the point.

Barry Seal was a commercial pilot for Trans World Airlines in the 1970s. He was caught smuggling cigars between embargoed Cuba and the United States. Instead of charging him, the CIA enlisted him into their program taking pictures of leftist militias in Central America and arming the “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua. “American Made” tells the somewhat true story of how it all spun out of control.

“American Made” contains an odd blend of emotions. The founding members of the Medellin Cartel talk Seal (Tom Cruise) into flying cocaine between Colombia and the United States. The exploits of Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa aren’t generally taken as lightly as they are by the director, Doug Liman. Tom Cruise’s manic and comical energy is prevalent throughout “American Made,” spinning the darkness of the subject matter into an upbeat romp.

The twisted humor of Cruise and Liman makes “American Made” fully enjoyable, even during the darkest moments. The soundtrack encourages the wild mood. It’s full of 1970s disco and jazz, including tracks from Walter Murphy, John Ever Villa and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Sarah Wright, playing Seal’s fictional wife, Lucy, is phenomenally dynamic. Her shift from a confused and angry housewife to high-living crime wife is flawless.

Domhnall Gleeson is also excellent as Monty Schafer, the made up CIA agent who starts Seal down his path of smuggling. Gleeson portrays Schafer as an unsettlingly cheerful operative who brings new smuggling jobs to Seal with a wide smile.

The truthfulness of “American Made” is sketchy, to be generous. Tom Cruise’s representation of Seal is that of a family man led astray by the dirty CIA for the sake of money and to provide for his family. In reality, Seal was married three times, with five children from all three of his wives. Lisa Seal Frigon, the real-life Barry Seal’s daughter, filed suit against Universal Pictures for misrepresenting Seal’s life.

Telling Barry Seal’s story with such a jaunty spin was a strange decision. It could be argued, and Liman does exactly that, that Seal made the Medellin Cartel into the force that it was. He also directly assisted Manuel Noriega’s rise to dictator in Panama, and made the the Nicaraguan and Iranian Contras possible.

The theme of “American Made” makes it seem like Liman wanted to make a classic Tom Cruise movie, and decided on which story it would be afterwards. It’s very much in the same vein as “Top Gun.” Something just doesn’t match. It’s an incredibly fun movie to watch, and changing the mood would ruin it, but something just doesn’t sit right when the real-life story is considered.

Peruvian author and journalist Marco Aviles visited the University of Maine on Thursday, Sept. 28 for a discussion of his new book, “No Soy tu Cholo” (I Am Not Your Cholo). The book is a collection of stories comparing racism in Peru to the discrimination that Latinos experience in the United States, especially central Maine, where Aviles now lives.

The lecture, titled “Cholo in Peru, Latino in the United States,” was organized by CHISPA, UMaine’s Hispanic culture organization.

Aviles’ talk consisted of personal anecdotes and stories heard from acquaintances. He works as an interpreter in the Blue Hill area, offering his services to workers on the blueberry farms. He worked with one Haitian man in Blue Hill who noticed a phenomenon he called “the look.” He was shopping for chicken at a health food store and felt so uncomfortable with the way white people were looking at him that he had to leave.

Aviles said that he has recognized the same problem living in central Maine. He described an experience of shopping in an upscale wine and cheese store and feeling the people stare at him as he browsed through.

After discussing prejudice in the United States, Aviles brought the audience to Peru. He taught them the hierarchical structure of Peruvian society by drawing a pyramid that showed three races. On the very top he wrote a series of surnames originating in northern Europe, on the middle level he wrote names of Spanish origin, such as “Hernandez,” “Castro” and his own. On the bottom of the pyramid he listed traditional Quechua names like “Quispe.” Under the pyramid Aviles drew flames to represent Hell.

He explained that in Peru, people of solely Quechua descent are seen as lesser humans than those with European or Amerindian background. Europeans are seen as the wealthiest and most successful class. Amerindians are called “Cholos,” which according to Aviles comes from either a Quechua or Spanish word meaning “dog” or “servant.”

Once the background of racism in Peru had been explained, Aviles shared that even as a successful writer and a journalist, he is discriminated against by people in his home country. He recently visited Peru to promote his book. While he was there, he went to a disco with some old friends where he was turned away by the doorman, because of what he assumed was his mixed racial background.

In the same trip he gave a talk at a local TV station. The guard at the station didn’t believe that he was really a writer and had to be coerced into letting Aviles into the building.

Aviles has two other published books. “De Donde Venimos los Cholos” (“Where We Cholos Come From”) is about discrimination against non-whites in Peru during a resurfacing of racism. “Dia de Visita” (“Visiting Day”) is about the society created in a women’s prison in Lima, Peru.

CHISPA will be holding lectures and other events for the duration of Hispanic Heritage Month that lasts from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. Upcoming talks include “Puntos Suspensivos: A Personal Geography” by Zachary Ludington and “Sistering with Carasque: a Journey in Solidarity” by Katie Greenman.