That time my parents and I almost got arrested in a grocery store in Spain

My parents are here.
We've been eating a lot. It's good.
Yesterday, my mom met my Spanish mom. They both spoke at each other in respective languages and I got to play a game I call Word God. Word God is one you stand between two people who don't speak a common language, but you happen to speak both languages, and you get to selectively translate - or just make things up. The UN has many careers in Word God and I'm now thinking this game could be a serious profession. If only I spoke English...

Just your average public peacock. See: Katy Perry.

Today, after a long day of touring in an ancient palace with peacocks roaming beside us (among other typical sites of Sevilla), we went up to my neighborhood, far away from the center of the city and anything interesting, to have dinner with my host family in my host home. It was sort of like a wedding, a union of two families. Except no one was getting married.

Now, things get a little crazy on the way. Here is my (not-real) police testimony:
So, we went to buy some pastries to bring over at Corte Ingles, the not-so-local 8-story department store. We get some lovely cookies and pay for them and then walk over to the grocery section with the intent to purchase sandwich materials for my parents' trip to Granada tomorrow. We get in line to buy the sandwich materials. The cashier demands, "Que es esta bolsa?" to my father, who is holding the pastry bag. He has no idea what she is saying because that's Spanish. She demands to see the receipt. No one has the receipt. We're pretty sure we never got one. Uh oh.

The cashier says we cannot leave or purchase the other items until we show a receipt. She was making crazy eyes and huffing and puffing from her high cashier stool. Steam came out of her ears. (You weren't there. You don't know if that's true or not.) My mom starts freaking out in English at the cashier, who knows no English. "We obviously just bought them over there, no one gave us a receipt, you really think we'd try to steal some pastries? I'm furious, this is ridiculous, yada yada yada!" I'm flustered and stay to explain to her what happened (Word God to explain my mom's bugging: "Ellos no hablan espanol (They don't speak Spanish).") while my mom runs over to the bake shop to ask for a receipt. Except my mom knows no Spanish also. So I pay for the sandwich goods, leave them with my dad at the register to just stand there and wait, while I sprint across the floor to the bakeshop.

There, my mom is cryptically signing to the bakery woman while speaking Frenchlish. The lady probably thinks my mom is asking for the recipe or where the cookies are made - or just that my mom is a psychotourist from Mars.  I ended up digging the receipt out of a garbage bin of receipts behind the bake shop cash register (yeah - they don't typically give them out - instead they just dump them in long strings into garbage bins). Triumphantly waving the receipt in the air, I marched right up to that mean cashier and showed it to her. After the full twenty minute ordeal of shouting and running and scrambling and translating and utter confusion for all involved, she smiled and said, "Gracias." Thanks to you too. Have a most wonderful day.

Dinner went swimmingly, the pastries were delicious, and my parents now know my other parents.

Dear Fake Dad, Why would you pull my hair right as a picture was being taken? Because you knew it would look weird and funny for my blog and contrast my normal American life with my ridiculous Spanish one? Thanks for the tonteria, Sebastian. Abrazos, Estefania