Die Rechnung, bitte

One of the differences between dining out in Germany and dining out in the U.S. is that in Germany, no one brings you your bill until you specifically ask for it. Unless you ask for the bill while your table is being cleared, you must hail the waiter across the room. Once you have accomplished eye contact, you raise your eyebrows a little and nod your head up and down while miming the act of holding a pen in your hand and writing out a bill. If the waiter is within hearing distance, you also say "die Rechnung, bitte" ("the bill, please").

Once you put this sequence into action, you must be prepared to pay as soon as the bill arrives. The waiter shows you the total, then stands next to you with his or her money pouch at the ready while you quickly calculate how much to add in for Trinkgeld. Trinkgeld means "drink money"--a little extra so the waiter can go out for ā Maß Biā (a portion of beer) or something after work. Waiters in Germany earn a decent wage, and service is already included in the bill, so the 15-20% we pay in the U.S. isn't necessary here. Still, you want to add in the right amount: too little, and you're cheap; too much, and you're an overpaying tourist. Trinkgeld is usually on the order of 5-10% of the total bill.

The waiter is standing there while you figure out the total and also while you pull out some bills and check the coins in your pocket. You need cash, because credit cards are rarely accepted in any but the most touristy of restaurants. If you're lucky, your pocket it full of nice big one- and two-Euro coins, or at least coins with monetary values ending in zeros (50 cents, 20 cents, 10 cents); but more likely, you have an excess of those annoying 1, 2, and 5 cent coins, and not in any combination that's useful for paying die Rechnung. Having wasted time hoping to unload your excess change, you revert to the paper bills and tell the waiter how much change you'd like back.

All of this makes me a little nervous. I'm not an assertive hailer, to begin with; and as a relative newbie in Germany, calculating appropriate Trinkgeld is still not obvious or intuitive to me yet. Then there's the added pressure of having the waiter stand there all the while, waiting to get on with his or her work while I'm wasting time pulling out my pocketful of useless pennies, so I forget to use coins altogether, add 10%, round up to the nearest Euro, and generally end up tipping too much.

When Elias and I were having lunch in Baden-Baden last weekend, my Rechnungsangst caused me to jump the gun a little. The waiter arrived to remove the dishes, and I knew she was going to ask if we wanted anything else, so when she did speak, I said, "no; the bill please." She became brusquely businesslike. It immediately occurred to me that she had probably said, "was everything to your liking?"--in response to which, "no; the bill please," takes on a somewhat different meaning.