Email no longer secure???

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Something really weird just happened. People more computer savvy than me - help!
The story - I'm switching over from DVDs to digital media, so thought I'd give google play movies a try. However I don't like using gmail due to the snooping and centralization, so I clicked the I'd like to use another email button.
It says my email of choice is already registered. I figure ok, I must have done this before and forgotten. I try all my passwords to no avail. It then has a button for forgot password, which I press. It sends a one-time code to the email I specified, I log into my email, retrieve, and use to log in to google.
This is where it gets weird - I'm suddenly in someone else's account. Everything is in spanish, so I can't understand anything about how to navigate, except for the email which is indeed the same as my email.
I just accessed someone else's account easily, and had access to all his info - past purchases, phone number, etc.
I tried to find a way to contact this person and ask wtf, but there doesn't seem to be that option.
I'm wondering if I was able to access his google+ account because he had my email listed, is he somehow able to access my email through a similar retrieval method, perhaps via a backup email address he used in conjunction with mine? I have purchase info in there, bank card details and so on.
Why would he have put that email down, when it is my email address - surely we couldn't both have created the same address. Usually if you do that, the message comes up sorry, someone else is already using that username and you have to try something else. Is it possible we both have the same email? What other reason would he have for putting someone else's email address? Because obviously, that leaves the door wide open to someone else accessing his account - even if it was only me by accident.
I'm just wary now that this might go both ways, and he can access my email.
The help forum suggested deleting the account - but I'm less than enthusiastic about just deleting some random stranger's whole account, possibly including any purchases he has made, just on an email mixup.
Anyone have any idea what's going on here, or what to do about it?

There is the option that someone used your primary email as a recovery to their google account, either delibarate (a random email or specifically yours), or by accident (a typo).

Your primary is safe though, the idea of a backup email is that the verification works only one way: the other person cannot retrieve that accounts' information trough google (by design, as it is, among other tasks, a protection against account theft).

one thing you can do to know what is happening is to access the account trough googles' "chrome" browser; that one offers a translation option for nearly any website from that sites setting to your computers system language (which i'll assume is english)