A well-travelled American gentleman of our acquaintance has an interesting way of asking for the bill which works all over the world.

He makes a square with the index fingers and thumbs of both hands and says "mitzu" with authority. For some reason, possibly owing to his generally distinguished air, it always works. As far as he knows mitzu does not mean bill in any known language but it sounds like the kind of word that could mean bill if one only knew the language.

We've tried it with some success but we need to work on the "looking sufficiently distinguished" bit!

PS I've marked the two boxes below this reply with a "tick".