How to find "night and day" decongestant for a head cold when there's a language barrier?

As a general rule when travelling, I've always been surprised by how helpful pharmacists are.

• They often speak quite a bit of English
• In many countries they have the authority to provide certain prescription drugs otherwise available only from doctors
• They often are surprisingly good at telling you what the local equivalent is for an American medication, especially if you know the generic name.

In a pinch if you can even get the name of the active ingredient written on a piece of paper I'd be surprised if they couldn't figure it out and help you in most countries.

If all else fails, ask the staff at your hotel or hostel to write down a translation of what you want on a piece of paper that you can bring to the pharmacist, or, if that's still not helping, get Language Line on the phone.

I use Sudafed, which has only the pseudoephrine in it. In Canada, this has gone through many levels of getting-harder-to-buy, because you can use it to make meth. This started as a special coloured price tag meaning you had to pay at the pharmacy instead of the main checkout, then it came off the shelves and you had to ask at the pharmacy (you have to do this for Tylenol 3 and such too), then the formula was changed to something else ephrine, which frankly did not work for me, and now thy've gone back to the pseudo ephrine but you can pretty much only buy it with tylenol (acetominophen/paracetamol) already in it, which apparently makes it harder to make into meth or something.

One suggestion is not to try for the day/night thingy as a single package. Figure out how to buy just a decongestant, or a decongestant with added painkiller. Also figure out how to buy a decongestant/antihistamine combo, which will almost certainly be much easier. If, like me, you can't take antihistamine in the day, you may have to settle for only the "night" part of your combo.

I would bring in a piece of paper with the ingredient names in English and ask the pharmacist to point out which ingredients are in which pills. You don't want to add an acetominophen overdose to your troubles.

DISCLAIMER: I am not pharmacist, so take my answer at your own risk! (Translations of technical words by courtesy of Google and Wikipedia)

I found another drug for colds which contains pseudoephedrin and which seems to be popular. This is Actifed. It was part of the medication kit for Apollo missions.

In France, it exists as a day & night (fr) package:

• white pill containing paracetamol (analgesic) and pseudoephedrin (vasoconstrictor) for the day.
• blue pill containing paracetamol and diphenhydramine (antihistamine) for the night.