I arrived in Paris early on a September afternoon. My colleague Jean-Philippe, met me at Charles de Gaulle Airport and drove me into Paris, past the Arc de Triomphe, to my hotel room near the Etoile. Three hours after my arrival, I looked up at the Eiffel Tower with another colleague, Béatrice. Any second now, I was going to throw up.

The travel advice columns state adamantly that, no matter what, you must stay up until bedtime when you arrive in a new city, even if it’s 3 a.m. by your body clock and you haven’t slept in 27 hours. To do otherwise is to invite total ruination of your trip, not to mention the advertising your lack of travel sophistication to whoever might notice. I was game, but my stomach had other plans.

I had left San Francisco the previous day, Saturday. I tried to sleep on the plane. Really I had. I refused to listen to the movie, on the theory that it would only keep me up, so as a result I sat through a Ben Stiller movie, Keeping the Faith, without sound. By the time we were over the Atlantic, I gave in. I decided to watch a movie with sound, but in French, since I had a choice. If I couldn't sleep, at least I could practice my French. I don’t remember the name of the movie—it was about ballet dancers. But although I wasn't tired enough to sleep, I was too tired to concentrate on French. I had now watched two movies without words.

I had discovered in Dallas how tiring it is to try to communicate for any length of time in a foreign language--and I'm not talking about the way Texans talk. Jean-Philippe, Béatrice and two of their co-workers, Athena and Alain, had come to Dallas for two weeks for the first phase of the collaboration between their company in Paris and mine. I felt sorry for them, coming to America for the first time, only to find themselves spending two weeks in Dallas in August. In fact, I felt sorry for myself for having to spend two weeks in Dallas in August. Everyone in the office learned the most essential Dallas French phrase --il fait chaud--it's hot!

All four took to Dallas with French aplomb. They were frankly astonished at the enormous portions of food served to them in restaurants, and puzzled as to why anyone would want to drink their beer that cold (because il fait chaud, perhaps?), but Athena didn't bat an eye when the ceiling in her hotel room began to leak, or when she came back to her room one day to find a strange man (who turned out to be the repairman). Most admirable of all, none of them got sick.

Maybe I was too excited. I'd never been out of the United States before, except for our honeymoon trip to Victoria, British Columbia, which is not only in the same time zone as San Francisco, but offers views of the good old U.S. across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Maybe I was just too tired. Obviously, I'm not an elegant traveler. Whatever the reason, I had finally made it to the Eiffel Tower and I had to go lie down.

Beatrice couldn't have been kinder, which only made me feel more like a prime representative of every weak-willed, spoiled American who ever bemoaned the lack of an elevator to get to the top of Notre Dame. Still, no matter how battered the ego or strong the will, neither is a match for the stomach on a bad day.

We took a bus partway back to the hotel, and then decided to find a cab for the rest of the trip. We sat in a sidewalk café for a bit, in a leafy green and wrought iron part of town straight out of a Charles Boyer movie. The air itself spoke French. I could have cried. Back at the hotel, I gave up trying to figure out the method of turning on the lights. I had a little credit card-shaped thing meant to be inserted into a slot, but the lights didn't want to stay on. (Later I realized that I had to leave the card in the slot to keep the lights on, not slide it in and out as I had stubbornly done for two days, as if I were getting money out of an ATM.) I crawled into bed and engaged in that forbidden of traveler's activities: I slept all afternoon. In fact, I slept all night too.

During a brief period of consciousness between my afternoon and evening naps, I flipped through the TV channels and found ER dubbed in French. Impossible to follow all those medical terms in French, and even more disorienting were the characters’ voices. I’m used to the voices of the American actors. Dr. Green has a decidedly lower voice in French. Maybe he’d been up all night and felt queasy.

By the next morning, when Beatrice fetched me to go to work, I had revived. In the Metro station, she showed me how to buy a ticket, and took me to a photo booth, so I could get a photo for my carte orange, the public transportation pass. In the recent French movie Amalie, there’s a character who collects the pieces of pictures people have discarded at the photo booths in the Metro stations. He made collages out of them. If he had found my picture, he would have had a decidedly chipmunk-faced woman to add to his collection. But I had left parts of my features in other times zones and I didn’t expect them to arrive that day. This was the best I could hope for. I kept the picture.

My husband arrived in Paris a week and a half after I did. He took the same flights I had taken. I took the Air France bus from the Etoile to Charles de Gaulle to pick him up. Seasoned veteran that I now was, I suggested that he take a nap, even a little one. I told him it was fine if he didn’t feel like going out for awhile.

You know what I’m going to tell you. He deposited his luggage in the hotel room and said he wanted to take a little walk while I went back to work. This little walk led him down the Champs Elysee, through the Place de la Concord, past the Louvre, through Luxenburg Park. He held up through most of dinner too, although it took some strong espresso to keep his eyes open through the crème brulèe.

Sooner or later, jet lag catches up with everyone.

Laura Fischer is a professional commercial and freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Clippings can be found at PandaProse.com