The Eating in Translation blog asks the question
When you don’t speak the language, how do you order a dish that’s not on the regular menu?
You download a photo to your mobile phone. Clever.
It won’t do much good when you are looking for a beer, though. In countries where they don’t understand your need for a beer, they will usually only have mediocre pale lagers, anyway.
The only place where I have had problems explaining to the waitress that I wanted a beer was in Vilnius. 1998. But it was, luckily, in the menu, so I guessed and pointed at some beverage that came in both 0,3 and 0,5 measures. That did the trick.
Useful tip, I must try to rember that.
One might also look for the word “alus”, which is not that far from “øl” or “ale”
(Of course, Lithuanian has noun declension, so it might appear as al- with a different ending in some contexts, such as “alaus”, which is genitive singular.)
I’m sure things have changed in Lithuania since then..