My Spanish is terrible. Horrendous. No wait. If there were a word meaning “worse than horrendous,” that would be the word to describe my Spanish.

What can I say, I took French in school instead. And yet, I somehow seem to have the best grasp of Spanish of my entire family, and so I am expected to do all the ordering, all the direction-asking, all the hi’s and bye’s and thank-you’s.

With  a limited range of verbs at my disposal, and a shaky command of prepositions, over the past 10 days in Spain I have gone forth with my familial duties and uttered the following actual phrases.

I speak Spanish a small.

Please, where is one bathroom for the girl?

I go this here? Or this other here? What direction?

Is possible pasta with butter only for the girl?

Is possible sauce of tomato? No salsa. Ketchup sauce of tomato.

Please, I will eat bread with toasted please. 

My man is a coffee with milk, please. Thank you sir.

Thank you for the everything. You good lady.

Password for wifi? Numbers? Numbers secret? For wifi? Speak to me.

No one kilo fish. No more kilo. Small kilo. 5 and one hundred. 5 hundred.

Sac please. You have sac? For sandwich for the house. With me. No here. For the house.

American no good with car. I automatic. Spain people, good with car.

The baby boy here, beautiful girl. So beautiful!

I have one big wine for only me, please now.

Fortunately, as bad as I am, I will never be worse than my mother who walked around  Bilbao asking, “Habla Espanol?” then wondering why everyone looked at her funny.